Worldofwarcraft Bossfight

World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft
Daniel Lisi
Boss Fight Books
Los Angeles, CA
bossfightbooks.com
Copyright © 2016 Daniel Lisi

All rights reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-940535-12-8

First Printing: 2016
Series Editor: Gabe Durham

Book Design by Ken Baumann
Page Design by Christopher Moyer
For Joe
CONTENTS
1 What I Talk About When I Talk About Warcraft

20 A Portrait of the Raider as a Young Man
42 Love in the Time of Blizzcon
57 Griefers, Trolls, and Other Monsters
74 More Than Our Avatars
85 What Keeps Us Coming Back
104 Notes
110 Acknowledgements
PA R T I :
W H AT I TA L K A B O U T
W H E N I TA L K A B O U T
WARCRAFT
Hooked on a Feeling
In an aggressively hormonal and socially isolated

stage of my life, I used World of Warcraft as a means
of social connection, romance, entertainment,
inspiration, and escape. When WoW came out on
November 23, 2004, I was thirteen years old. I had
been playing video games since the age of four, starting
off my life-long passion with a Nintendo 64 console
and all the greats of the time: Super Mario 64, The
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Star Fox 64, Mario
Kart 64, and GoldenEye 007. Shortly after its release,
World of Warcraft was installed and ready to play on
my computer, and I was about to enter a world that
would impact me for the rest of my life.
In my nine years of gaming, never before had I seen
a single title take such a massive audience by storm.
The MMO dominated gaming media, so much so
that it merited the creation of news websites dedicated
entirely to World of Warcraft. One of the more popular
WoW news sources at the time, MMOChampion.com,
started in 2007 and during WoW’s prime brought in no
fewer than ten million users a month.
The game soon burst out of its niche culture and
into the mainstream, making headlines for its enormous
wo rld o f warcraf t
financial achievement and its knack for drawing in
gamers and non-gamers alike.
I was introduced to World of Warcraft by my
stepdad Joe, a Navy man halfway through his two-
year deployment in Okinawa, Japan when he met and
married my mother. One afternoon, Joe took me to the
mall on one of the first few one-on-one outings we had
ever had: two strangers who were somehow required to
build a parent-child relationship. He was eager to get
on my good side, and I, as a manipulative thirteen-year-
old, was eager to have him buy me shit.
We ended up in the EB Games store, and there it
was: the game I’d been dying to play. “I’ve heard so much
about this game!” I said, picking up the box of EverQuest
II. Joe shook his head. “No, no,” he said, handing me a
different box, one with an angry-faced green creature on
the front of it, WORLD OF WARCRAFT emblazoned
in gold font. “Let’s play this instead.”
This was the fall of 2004. Joe was on a two-month
leave, but he’d soon be returning to Okinawa. It was
difficult connecting with Joe when there was such a
huge distance between us physically and emotionally.
My mother had remained a single parent for nearly
twelve years after divorcing my biological father, so my
new father figure had to find a way to break down some
emotional walls to connect with me. Joe intended to
use World of Warcraft as a tool to bond the two of us
3
so that we could play together, chat, and continue the
experience even when he was overseas.
And to that end, his plan succeeded. While Joe was
overseas, World of Warcraft served as our primary means
of communication. We’d log on and literally squat
our characters down on a bench somewhere in one of
Azeroth’s grand cities and type away to each other. This
method of bonding worked for us. We kept each other
up to date and explored the fantasy realm quite a bit
together, playing the roles of father and son in a virtual
world.
But what Joe could not have predicted was that
World of Warcraft would soon became a lifestyle for me.
I eagerly avoided the eighth grade social world to spend
more time in Azeroth, replacing outdoor activities and
in-person hangouts with in-game events and dungeon
raids. Eventually I joined a guild, a group of players
who team up to face the game’s tougher content, and
my dedication for WoW only increased from there.
In other words, I’d bought into the full World of
Warcraft experience, one that can be broken up into five
phases:
1. Pay Blizzard. After purchasing the game client

for $50, you must set up an online subscriber
account that charges you a monthly fee of $15 to
retain online access to the game.
2. Early-game. Pick a character faction. You can
take sides with the mighty Horde or the honor-
able Alliance. Pick a character race. If you teamed
up with the Horde during the classic unexpanded
version of WoW, you could be a brutish Orc, a
gangly and stoner-y Troll, a peaceful shamanistic
Tauren, or one of the cursed Undead. If you
took the Alliance route, you could be a run-of-
the-mill xenophobic fantasy Human, a tall stoic
Night Elf, a crafty Gnome, or your typical loud
bombastic Dwarf. Finally, pick your class. Each
faction has the Warrior, Mage, Warlock, Druid,
Priest, Rogue, and Hunter to choose from. The
Paladin used to be a class specific to the Alliance,
and the Shaman used to be specific to the Horde,
but Blizzard has since made all classes available to
all factions.
3. Mid-game. The level cap before any of the
expansions was 60. If you found yourself between
levels 30 and 40, you had a pretty good sense of
whether or not you were in it for the long haul.
Statistically, players would drop off around this
point if the game wasn’t their cup of tea mechan-
ically, or if they didn’t have anyone to play with
online. I was not a part of the minority that fell
away, which brings us to…
5
4. End-game. Once you hit level 60 it was time to
venture forth into the game’s top-level dungeons.
Dungeons are challenging areas where you take
a party, a group of exactly five players, and send
them into a dangerous zone to defeat its bosses
and earn the dungeon’s coveted rare items. These
items are designed to make your character power-
ful enough to eventually face raid content. Raids
are huge dungeons made for 40-player groups
to combat against World of Warcraft’s toughest
enemies. Nowadays raids only require between
10 and 25 players, but back in the un-expanded
World of Warcraft, raids necessitated a group of 40
individuals to team up and not only play the game
together, but effectively coordinate their efforts
to operate as one unified monster-demon-zom-
bie-whatever killing machine. This logistical terror
is made less terrible via guilds, teams of players who
raid together regularly. Guilds unify players with
similar goals and playtimes, and allow players to
anticipate each other’s tactics and gameplay abili-
ties, turning raids into both a team practice and the
game itself. Third-party voice chat software (like
Ventrilo or TeamSpeak) is often mandated across
the guild so that these huge groups of players can
communicate effectively in real-time. Some guilds
are casual and face off against raid content only
once or twice a month. Others hold a strict daily
schedule, which leads us to the final, optional tier
of becoming a WoW player.
5. Hardcore players. To become the best a World of
Warcraft server has to offer requires commitment.
Hardcore raiding guilds—guilds that compete
with one another on a national scale to clear end-
game boss content before any other guild in the
world (or on a smaller scale, their server)—spend
up to six scheduled evenings a week, usually
between four to six hours of game time per ses-
sion, to progress through raid content. This race
is tracked on the leaderboards of WoWProgress.
com, a third-party website that displays every
boss killed by every WoW guild on Earth.
I became a hardcore player. After Joe got me hooked,

I spent the next three and a half years playing WoW with
the same group of people, three to four nights a week,
three to five hours a night. These were people I got to
know intimately.
The vast multitudes of people playing WoW turned
the game into a global cultural phenomenon, which
in turn made excessive playing socially acceptable. At
its peak, World of Warcraft held twelve million annual
subscribers, almost half the entire population of Europe
in the sixth century. And that is exactly what made World
7
of Warcraft the World of Warcraft we know—people.
Millions and millions of people.
The Genesis of Warcraft
On February 8, 1991, UCLA graduates Michael

Morhaime, Frank Pearce, and Allen Adham founded
Silicon & Synapse, a company that chiseled itself into
the Blizzard Entertainment we know today, a developer
of some of the world’s largest video game franchises.
Blizzard released three titles under their old moniker
of Silicon & Synapse: RPM Racing, The Lost Vikings,
and Rock n’ Roll Racing. After rebranding to Blizzard
Entertainment in 1994, the company released another
original title called Blackthorne and a contract project,
The Death and Return of Superman, before hatching a
game that would change the games industry forever:
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans is a real-time strategy game
that introduced us to the world of Azeroth for the very
first time. The elevator pitch for Warcraft: Humans live
on the planet Azeroth. The evil Orcs, fueled by bloodlust
and strife, invade Azeroth via a portal from their home
planet of Draenor, creating a culture of never-ending
war between the two factions.
Warcraft became Blizzard’s greatest financial and
critical success yet. In November 1995 Entertainment
Weekly reported that the game was ranked the 19th best-
selling game across all categories that year. The success
of Warcraft offered Blizzard a degree of financial stability
and direction that hammered out the foundation for
the mega-company that it is today.
After another contractual gig developing Justice
League Task Force, Blizzard released the sequel for their
budding franchise, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, on
December 9, 1995. Mechanically, the game is a spitting
image of Warcraft, offering the same user interface
and array of gameplay mechanics, with some decently
upgraded graphics. A review from Computer Games
Magazine emphasizes that the sequel’s AI systems “far
surpassed that of the original game.” When Warcraft II
met with similar critical and financial success as the first
Warcraft, Blizzard became as powerful of a development
force as Westwood Studios, id Software, and LucasArts.
Blizzard Entertainment’s development output
between 1995 and 2002 was straight-up bonkers. After
Warcraft II’s successful expansion, Warcraft II: Beyond the
Dark Portal, Blizzard launched two more game-chang-
ing franchises with Diablo (1996) and StarCraft (1998),
two games that deserve books themselves.
Before the release of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos in
2002, Blizzard dropped a juicy nugget of news at the
9
European Computer Trade Show in September 2001:
an MMORPG based in the Warcraft universe was
coming to the PC.
Warcraft III became a massive critical and financial
success, permitting the release of an expansion pack on
July 1, 2003, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. At this
point, World of Warcraft was roughly two to three years
into development, using the proprietary elements of
Warcraft III’s graphics engine to sculpt the aesthetic of
the game.
After a total of four to five years of development
and extensive testing, World of Warcraft released to the
public on November 23, 2004, the 10th anniversary of
the Warcraft franchise.
By 2005, World of Warcraft held 5,000,000
worldwide subscribers. By comparison, EverQuest’s
subscription base had peaked at 450,000 in its
lifetime. It was obvious that in just one year, WoW had
launched an MMO—one of the more obscure genres
in gaming—into what would become one of the most
profitable assets in gaming history.
The three years spanning between 2007 and 2010
was when World of Warcraft ascended from niche
culture popularity into the mainstream. WoW blazed
trails through pop culture with commercials featuring
celebrities like William Shatner and Aubrey Plaza and
television shows like South Park dedicating episodes to
the realm of Azeroth. Every other 7-Eleven snack food
had a World of Warcraft theme attached to it, inspiring
Mountain Dew to create their own themed flavors of
soda: Alliance Blue and Horde Red.
Blue tasted better.
Azeroth in Decline
Since WoW’s player base peak in 2010, the MMO’s

population has had its ups and downs, influenced
entirely by the introduction of new expansion packs.
Millions of users taper off after five or six months of
a new expansion and millions of users return the first
month of a new expansion pack’s release. The player
base has tended to gravitate between eight to ten million
users, until its record low in 2015 when the population
sank to 5.6 million subscribers.
If you Google “is World of Warcraft dying,” a
significant number of results pop up for every single
year since 2011. Countless articles have predicted
the possible, eventual, and inevitable decline of the
monolithic MMO.
The truth is: World of Warcraft has been “dying” since
its launch day. The MMO is an organic creature, and its
players are its blood. Every year there’s a plethora of new
content that augments the world and expands its depth,
11
making it a more interesting, more complex ecosystem.
The systems that were so fresh and groundbreaking years
ago will lose their luster when compared to a generation
of newer games.
A flashy new RPG will arrive, new consoles will
release, and captivating experiences that demand
attention will catch the user’s eye and steal away
another $15 subscription from Blizzard Entertainment.
But judging by the three million subscriber uptick on
Warlords of Draenor’s 2014 release, I think it’s fair to
say that all the player base wants is to be entertained by
new things, even if WoW’s ability to satisfy those wants
is constantly threatened by younger, flashier games.
World of Warcraft is simply dying of old age. In
the world of technology and new media, a world that
outdates and adapts itself swiftly and mercilessly, it has
lived a remarkably long life, and is aging damn well
considering that it still maintains a subscriber base that
still trumps the peak base of most new MMOs. Like
EverQuest, there will be active WoW servers for decades
to come.
According to Blizzard at the time of this writing,
two more expansions packs will release before Blizzard
ceases spending development resources on WoW. World
of Warcraft: Legion, WoW’s sixth expansion pack, is
slated for release November 2016.
Whenever a glossy new cinematic trailer is released,
I’m always tempted to return to Azeroth, to explore a
world that I grew up in, that shared a huge part of my
childhood. But playing World of Warcraft just isn’t what
I want out of a game anymore. My tastes have changed,
and the MMO no longer fulfills me or entertains me. I
aged alongside World of Warcraft. It is like a childhood
pet that I once shared a deep bond with, but eventually
had to put down and bury in the backyard.
The Mechanics of World of Warcraft
After creating an account with Blizzard Entertainment’s

battle.net and punching in your credit card number for
the $15 monthly fee to play World of Warcraft, you’re
ready to log on, pick a server, and create your first
character.
Mechanically, World of Warcraft follows the straight-
forward keyboard-and-mouse fantasy RPG play system
adopted directly from EverQuest, and Ultima Online
before that. The movement scheme is a standard WASD
button layout, meaning you press W to move forward,
A to move left, S to move right, and D to move back-
wards. You use the mouse to determine your camera
direction, to interact with your environment, and to
13
activate your abilities from a bar nesting an array of
icons at the bottom of your screen.
After picking from between the nine class options
and five races, you’re given an array of aesthetic
customization options to pick from. When you’ve
settled on your looks and your name, your avatar is
dropped into your race’s specific starting zone to begin
learning your class’s basic abilities and the game’s control
mechanisms.
World of Warcraft takes place in the Tolkienesque
planet of Azeroth. From the overworld, you can
seamlessly explore a sprawl of rural landscapes and cities,
only experiencing a loading screen when transitioning
from one continent to another, or into a dungeon or
raid.
To give some perspective into the size of World of
Warcraft’s world, the Eastern Kingdoms, Azeroth’s
easternmost continent, is approximately twelve square
miles of real-world equivalent playable terrain. Azeroth
was enormous compared to other game worlds of its
time, particularly to the worlds of more linear games
that confined to very specific parameters. World of
Warcraft’s borders are open and seamless, allowing for
seemingly boundless exploration.
You initially progress through the game by defeating
enemies and completing quests. Both of these actions
grant you experience points that advance you to higher
levels. The initial level cap of World of Warcraft was level
60, and it commonly took players an average of three
months, at four to five hours of playtime a week, to
reach this level. The game now, at its level cap of 105,
has since found ways to expedite this process, even
allowing players to purchase their way into higher levels
in an intricate micro-transaction system.
As you progress in level, your character gains
additional abilities depending on its class, and your
playstyle adjusts to the role you choose to take. World of
Warcraft originally had nine classes—Druids, Hunters,
Mages, Paladins, Priests, Rogues, Shaman, Warlocks,
and Warriors—and the expanded WoW now offers
Death Knights and Monks. Legion, WoW’s forthcoming
sixth expansion, will introduce the Demon Hunter
as the game’s twelfth playable class. These classes are
partitioned into the three archetypes of RPG gameplay:
DPS (Damage Per Second), tanks, and healers.
DPS classes are responsible for dealing out perfectly
timed move combinations to inflict as much damage
as possible against enemies. Despite individual visual
styles and contextual mechanics that make each World
of Warcraft boss unique, battles generally boil down to
a race against the clock—kill the boss before the boss
kills you. This means that formulaically optimizing
the speed of your damage output is a necessity in later,
harder game content.
15
Tanks are the classes responsible for attracting
and absorbing most if not all incoming damage from
enemies. They’re given an array of abilities that generate
“aggro,” an internal metric that determines which player
in a party the AI is going to attack first, so that the DPS
and Healers are free to perform their duties without
having to worry about incoming enemy damage.
Healers meanwhile hold the group together by
replenishing members’ depleted hit points. If the party
dynamics are in correct order, healers typically focus
their healing powers on the tank, who receives the most
incoming damage.
Early on in the game’s progression you gain access
to your class’s “talent tree,” choosing from one of three
paths and then allocating “talent points” to specify your
class role according to your own tastes. This allows
for most classes, barring some specialists, to focus on
DPS, tanking, or healing. For example, a “Warrior” is
a common tanking class. If you wanted to focus on the
tanking element of gameplay, you’d allocate your talent
points (or “spec”) in the “Protection” tree.
Alternatively, if charging into the fray and decapitat-
ing your enemies with a humongous two-handed great
sword was more your style, you could then spec into
“Fury” and become a DPS warrior instead. Spending
talent points in your talent tree and gaining further
class abilities are the only two things that change the
game mechanically as you progress forward, allowing
you a wider selection of actions to perform in any given
combat scenario.
The next stage in World of Warcraft’s early gameplay
is delving into dungeons with a group of four other
players. Dungeons are separated from the public
overworld by the creation of “instances,” private areas
that remain exclusive to the group of players entering
them for the duration of their mission. When a party
enters a dungeon, an exclusive version of that dungeon is
created just for those five players. This allows the group
to progress at its own pace, and to prevent other players
from interfering with the challenge of that dungeon.
Running a dungeon is a hugely social task. And
whereas most dungeons today take about half an hour
to complete, many dungeons in the original WoW took
a full two hours. If your tank, healer, or DPS are not
pulling their weight, a party can take hours longer than
what would normally be required to defeat (or “clear”)
a dungeon’s content. A good party member in this early
stage can become a friend to hit the dungeons with
again, and can even eventually lead to a guild invite.
A party member’s reliability is quantifiable. If you
don’t do your job well—keeping enemies off the rest of
the party, keeping the tank alive, or quickly dispensing
of enemies—you’ll risk losing allies for future missions
or be bullied by your party’s other players.
17
The benefit of spelunking into these dungeons is
the promise of new equipment. Equipment in World of
Warcraft is broken up into six tiers:
• Poor Quality: Denoted with grey text. Good only

for selling to NPCs for chump change.
• Common Quality: Denoted with white text. The
type of gear your character starts out with.
• Uncommon Quality: Denoted with green text.
The type of equipment that will stick with you
for the first few levels, but will quickly become
obsolete when you begin dungeon content.
• Rare Quality: Denoted with blue text. The type
of gear bosses will drop inside of dungeons, or as
a reward for turning in difficult quests.
• Epic Quality: Denoted with purple text. The
gear you’ll find defeating raid bosses, and what
hardcore raiders strive to garb their characters in.
• Legendary Quality: Denoted with orange text.
The best of the best. Back in the day, there were
only two legendary weapons in the game, and
you’d be able to count on two hands the number
of people on a server who had them.
These mechanics as I’ve explained them create

the meat of World of Warcraft’s gameplay. On paper,
WoW sounds like a game I’d play for a week or two
before scuttling off to binge on the next game like the
insatiable cultural vampire I am. What, then, made us
players return again and again to World of Warcraft so
compulsively?
19
PA R T 2 :
A PORTRAIT OF
THE RAIDER AS
A YOUNG MAN
The Escapist
I was participating in a raid on the shadowy tower of

Karazhan with 24 of my fellow guildmates when I told
my stepfather to go fuck himself. He was in my room
asking me to turn off the computer and enjoy a nice
day in the park with the family, the kind of scheduled
outing that I used to crave, and instead of agreeing I
lashed out like the angsty teen I was. Immediately after,
I stared up at him goggle-eyed, feeling shocked at my
own absurdity, immediately predicting the ramifications
of my blatant disregard for parent-child dynamics.
To understand why I lashed out, you must first
understand how deeply I’d bought in.
One of the first changes made to the original World
of Warcraft (or “vanilla WoW”) in WoW’s first expansion
was the reduction of raiding parties from 40 members
to 25. This created a much more intimate environment
amongst teammates. Nobody was superfluous; everyone
needed to carry their weight or the entire operation
would stall like a Rube Goldberg machine missing a
domino.
As a result of the change, guilds took extensive
measures to screen new raiding members to ensure they
were not bringing on any dead weight, or as hardcore
21
raiders like to call them, “scrubs.” To even get to a point
where I qualified for an interview with a guild, I had to
reach level cap (one month of gameplay, averaging 20
hours a week), play through lower-difficulty dungeons
to acquire enough gear on my own to reach minimum
levels of damage per second to prove a viable asset to
the raid (another month), and finally join the guild on
a probationary basis to show that they could get along
with me personally (one final month). This process—
more demanding than landing yourself an entry-level
job—is what separated me from the casual arena of
World of Warcraft.
I went through three interviews, one with the guild
master, one with my class leader (I played a rogue), and
finally one with the raid leader—the fella whose job it
was to read any and all material on boss encounters,
teach us the raid the mechanics of every encounter, then
call the shots during the encounter itself. The skillset
required to be a good raid leader is rather impressive.
You have to give commands from a core set of knowledge
on an improvised basis depending on the actions of 24
other people. Having the proper reaction to all of those
contingencies was what made a good raiding guild
good, and often earned the raid leader the respect of his
or her comrades.
Through no small effort I made the cut. I was now
a member of a prestigious raiding guild. According to
the journal I kept the summer of 2005, this was my
proudest achievement to date, usurping my first place
trophy from the 2003 AYSO soccer league.
Two of my real-life friends were a part of this guild,
and my acceptance did wonders for our bond. We went
from hanging out on campus with mutual friends to
exclusively seeing each other on a daily basis, hanging
out after school, and taking midnight trips to Denny’s
after binging on WoW for hours. Eventually my
commitment to the guild surpassed even theirs, and I
developed a closer affinity with my online guildmates
than I had with them. My real-life friends moved on to
a more casual guild while I continued in the arena of the
hardcore raider.
From my parents’ perspective, red flags about my
relationship with World of Warcraft started appearing
long before I told my stepdad to go fuck himself. A few
months after I had started playing in 2004, I skipped
Rosh Hashanah. Instead of celebrating the Jewish New
Year with my mother, four aunts, six cousins, and a
gaggle of family friends, I stayed home to play WoW.
My mother was livid. Joe made an international call
from Okinawa to ask me why I decided against spending
time with my family that evening. It bothered me that
Joe had called me instead of messaging me in-game. I
told him about my discomfort with family gatherings,
23
and that I’d rather be playing WoW than blowing on a
shofar.
More than anything, I found it necessary to impress
my guildies. There was trust placed in me to perform
my job, a job I’d spent weeks studying for and grinding
toward. I often think about the amount of time I spent
on this goal, searching for some kind of silver lining,
some kind of skill that I refined that I now apply to my
everyday life. I am sure my stepfather, moments after
being cussed at by a kid in his care, was asking himself
the same thing. What could his stepson be deriving
from such a prolonged exposure to WoW? At the time,
all that mattered was the impression I’d leave on my
companions if I abandoned them mid-raid.
In Mario Lehenbauer-Baum and Martina Fohringer’s
paper “Towards Classification Criteria for Internet
Gaming Disorder: Debunking Differences Between
Addiction and High Engagement in a German Sample
of World of Warcraft Players,” the authors point out
that while we humans have become good at identifying
substance addiction in one another (loss of control,
withdrawal symptoms, and negative consequences
in school, the workplace, and in relationships), we
are much less experienced in recognizing addiction
to online games. The addiction, like gaming itself, is
simply too new.
The role of researchers like Lehenbaur-Baum and
Fohringer, then, is to identify what being “addicted to
games” actually looks like. The paper’s study focuses on
the divide between players who are highly engaged with
World of Warcraft but are still capable of maintaining
their responsibilities in the real world and a minority
of players that “seem to have problems with a healthy
amount of gaming.”
I was a member of the latter group. And while
no term for my affliction existed at the time, the
American Psychiatric Association in 2013 introduced
“Internet Gaming Disorder” (IGD) to the fifth edition
of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM-5)—the psychiatrist’s bible of mental
disorders—as a “Condition for Further Study.”
When I recently asked Joe what he thought eight
years ago when I told him to go fuck himself, he told
me that I reacted how any addict reacts when his vice
is threatened.
Joe’s solution was to ban me from World of Warcraft.
I didn’t take the news well. I claimed that my life would
be devoid of any joy, that this was all I had. These claims
only solidified my stepfather’s understanding that I was
addicted to World of Warcraft.
At the time, I really didn’t think I could get by
without WoW. As a five-foot kid with a love for fantasy
and computers, I practically had a target painted on my
25
back for bullies. The MMO was my salvation. Joining
an online community under a fantastical new identity
was a safe reprieve from schoolyard torment. Besides,
everything online seemed to be just as fulfilling as
anything the real world had to offer.
Perhaps what Joe saw in me was a stark reflection of
his own tousles with escapism. Joe, in the midst of his
duties in Japan, was in a place of mighty uncertainty
and rapid change. All within a year’s time he found
himself with a new wife, a sudden pregnancy, and a
stepson he was expected to father. Joe was only 24 years
old, as old as I am now writing this book. Video games
remained a static, relaxing certainty in his life, and his
own commitment to WoW often matched my own.
My first brush with gaming addiction was on a
virtual pet website called Neopets. I owe my full-
stack web development abilities to constructing and
maintaining an online storefront where I specialized
in selling paintbrushes to beautify the Neopet world’s
adorable digitized companions.
The primary draw of Neopets, like that of World of
Warcraft, was its community. I was able to relate to and
share with people my age without any social risk. Under
the safety blanket of the internet, I got to build new
personas, accentuating the aspects of myself that I liked
(my craftiness, wit, and aptitude for storytelling) while
burying those that made me insecure (my physicality,
my frizzy Jew-fro) behind the abstraction of an avatar.
I hoped that maybe someday the idealistic avatars I
created would somehow replace my real self.
In 2012, three researchers from University of
Hamburg’s Institute of Social Psychology published an
article titled “The Social Side of Gaming: How Playing
Online Computer Games Creates Online and Offline
Social Support.” The study sought to discover whether a
social life built on an online game’s community could be
as fulfilling as a social life born of in-person interactions.
After surveying 811 online gamers, the authors
concluded that online gaming may indeed result in
strong social ties between gamers playing the game
together, but that the gamers generally only reach a level
of deep social fulfillment if the relationship extends
beyond the game world and into the real one.
Mechanically, World of Warcraft is a formulaic
numbers-based RPG that relies solely on stat-boosting,
gear-building, and farming the same or similar content
in hopes of getting a brief spurt of euphoria brought on
by epic-rated items. Compared to a solo sandbox game
like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim—with its lush world,
fully voiced-over dialogue, and vast possibility space—
World of Warcraft’s gameplay has been engineered to run
on rails. Any of the variance in WoW’s gameplay comes
from the people you encounter it with.
27
The Design of a Hardcore Raider
In his 1961 book Man, Play, and Games, sociologist

Roger Caillois states that “[p]lay is an occasion of pure
waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often
money.” He adds that games are also a source of joy, as
well as a healthy means of escape from responsibility
and routine, but must adhere to a set of rules to reach a
healthy balance.
Caillois offers such a set of rules for making games.
According to Caillois, a game must create a carefree space
in which the player feels free from obligation, must not
bleed into the player’s “real life,” must not offer the player
certain success, must not be a “productive” activity but
must exist for its own sake, must be governed by clear
and discernible rules, and must be rooted not in reality
but make-believe. These are rules I follow when making
my own games.
In The Burning Crusade, WoW’s first expansion,
Blizzard introduced “daily quests”— tasks that can be
completed on a daily basis to earn the same reward each
time, usually a sum of in-game currency and “reputation
points,” a metric used to determine your standing
amongst in-game factions. Once your reputation
reached the maximum with a faction, you gained access
to powerful enchantments and items that sometimes
proved vital to end-game players.
This feature obliges players to check back in on a
daily basis to meet standards that were being set by
raiding guilds, adding yet another necessary task to keep
up with being a good guild member—breaking one of
Caillois’s rules for play.
For many hardcore raiders, myself included, raiding
started to feel like a second job. The social obligation and
the risk of being removed from your role in a guild moti-
vates hardcore players to return to the game on a habitual,
regimented basis. The chance at better equipment and the
opportunity to see game content unfold was only possible
when you clocked in every day. Your commitment, then,
is not to the game itself but to your community.
This is no accident. In the 2011 book Building Successful
Online Communities, the authors of a chapter called
“Encouraging Commitment in Online Communities”
advise that community designers “make design decisions
that influence whether and how people will become
committed to a community,” noting that “[c]ommitted
members work harder, say more, do more, and stick with a
community after it becomes established. They care enough
to help with community activities and to sustain the group
through problems.”
In WoW, the more work you put into raiding, the
more content your guild unlocks and the better gear
your team acquires. As Paul McCartney wrote in “The
End”: “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the
29
love you make”—just replace the first “love” with “gear”
and the second “love” with “raids.”
And raids are not just played but studied. We always
knew about the raid bosses we were to encounter, even
if it was our first time facing them. Every item a boss
could yield was calculated down to the percentage rate of
their dropping. Updates on raid content were carefully
spaced out just enough so that when the majority of
guilds had cleared a current patch’s raid, new content
was around the corner.
Hardcore raiding schedules turn an otherwise
unproductive “leisure” activity into a competitive sport,
whether you’re “only” vying for supremacy on your
server like we were or competing internationally against
top-tier guilds. The rules of the game at this level weren’t
only set by Blizzard developers but also by the WoW
community itself. The obligations and stresses of World
of Warcraft were created by us.
Alex Golub’s 2010 article “Being in the World
(of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge
Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game,”
outlines this progression succinctly:
These instances generally follow a certain “pro-

gression”: you must kill all of the bosses in one
instance before you can kill the bosses in another
instance. A guild’s success and seriousness is
measured by how far it has “progressed” in
“end-game content.” It is this goal of progression
that is shared by guild members. For instance,
in WoW 2.0 players must slay Gruul and
Magtheridon before moving on to Serpentshrine
Cavern, where they must slay five bosses before
finally taking down Lady Vashj. After this,
players may advance to Tempest Keep, kill the
three bosses there, and then take down Kael’thas
Sunstrider, the final boss. Once Vashj and Kael
are “down,” players are “attuned” to The Battle
of Mount Hyjal, where there are four bosses to
kill before taking down Archimonde. Only then
may players proceed to the Black Temple, where
there are eight bosses to kill before facing lllidan
Stormrage, the final boss in WoW 2.0.
Exodus, one of World of Warcraft’s highest-ranked

raiding guilds, disbanded in 2013. Shortly after, in a
Facebook post dated April 26, 2013, guild leader Killars
spoke out about the guild’s dissolution: “It’s certainly
becoming a more difficult breed to be a part of. What I
mean by this is of course the time commitment and the
level of sheer dedication and determination it takes and
costs to be at the very top... Unfortunately we (hardcore
raiders) pushed too hard. Tier after tier we just keep
adding to the insanity in both farming preparations
31
and actual progressing. It’s almost as if progression itself
never really ends after an end tier boss dies. Combine
this with Blizzard actually putting new content out
faster, alts playing a big role, PTR/BETA, dailies, coins,
BMAH, well... you just get lost in it all.”
This level of intensity is, of course, not shared by
every single raiding guild in World of Warcraft. However,
the behaviors do repeat themselves enough across guilds
and across servers to show a trend in the type of culture
and ideology created by hardcore players. The result is
a vicious cycle of addictive behavior that is spurred on
by a group of enablers—twenty-four other guildmates
participating in the same guild culture.
World of Warcraft’s original raiding content was
arguably the most demanding on its players, requiring
the 40-person raiding teams to log countless hours
progressing through content. On his blog Hardcore
Casual, WoW player SynCaine wrote a post in 2007
titled “Looking in the Mirror; the Sickness that Was
WoW Raiding.” The author was the main tank for a
top-tier raiding guild, as well as an officer in the guild’s
hierarchy. The guild raided six nights a week, starting
around 7 p.m. and ending around 1 or 2 a.m.
SynCaine talks about how he provided additional
hours around his raiding schedule to provide upkeep
and preparation support to the guild and its raids, and
only missed a raid if he “was on vacation (rare) or due
to some emergency (also rare),” adding, “I planned
movies/dates/dinners/etc. around raids.”
SynCaine’s raiding attendance was around 90-95%,
but regardless of his effort and the amount of hours he
spent outside of raiding, he writes:
I always felt I could be doing more, that our guild

was not progressing fast enough, that we were not
learning encounters as quickly as we should be,
or that our membership was not stable enough
to push faster. I spent a good amount of time
on our guild forums discussing ways to improve
our progress and increase our pace. I remember
getting frustrated with members who would
not log on consistently, or who had to leave a
raid halfway in. We knew exactly who our best
healer/DPS/support players were; we had the
guild all-stars and we had the rest. I could take
one look at a raid and know if we had a chance
for progress or not, simply based on how many of
our ‘key’ players were on that night. The players
who, like me, were consistently online and put in
the extra effort to read up on strategies and farm
up potions/buff items. It was a constant effort to
find those types of players to replace those that
‘only’ raided 3-4 nights a week, those that did not
33
put in the 2-3 hours to farm up potions or read
extensive strategy write-ups.
Whenever I did miss a raid, I would hear about it

the next day; and at worst find out that the raid
had not gone as planned due to lacking a tank.
This guilt factored in heavily in making me log
on. I felt that if I take a night off, I would be
letting 39 others down, people who depended on
me to be there. [...] Most of all, I did not want to
act like the people who I was trying to remove,
the ‘casual’ raiders who did not dedicate 5-7
nights a week to the guild.
The game became a stressful obligation rife with

social dependencies and pressure. What ended up
getting to SynCaine, though, was simply boredom.
Eventually, clearing the same content with the same
people week after week got stale. A full-sized World of
Warcraft raid typically housed eight to ten bosses, and
took around two months to clear fully.
Some bosses took many attempts to defeat. For
instance, the first boss in Blackwing Lair, a dragon
named Razorgore the Untamed, took my guild nearly
two weeks to conquer. When a boss defeats an entire
raid party, it is referred to as a “raid wipe.” Whether it
was poor party composition, ineffective leadership, or
just insufficient understanding of a boss’s mechanics,
your entire evening in a raid could be spent wiping over
and over again on a single encounter.
If a raiding group was frequently successful in
defeating the bosses of a raid, the group would return
every week to face the same content (or “farm” the
content) to continue beating the encounters they
became increasingly familiar with so that they could
obtain all of the items that a boss could possibly drop.
Epic-rated items that drop off of bosses have a degree
of scarcity to them regardless of a party’s ability to
defeat a boss consistently, with each item generally
having a 10-15% drop rate. This kind of scarcity made
it worthwhile for guilds to return on a regular basis to
defeat bosses they’ve already experienced.
Item scarcity made it so no player could get fully
equipped in his or her optimal raiding equipment with
only one successful raid clear. It took at least a month of
very lucky drops, and even then you’d have to compete
against other players in your guild who could also use
the same equipment.
Because of item scarcity, guilds created ingenious
internal economies completely independent of World of
Warcraft’s mechanics to determine who should receive
items dropped by raid bosses. The first system for fairly
distributing items in MMOs was the application of
Dragon Kill Points, or DKP, in EverQuest to deal with
35
the game’s similarly scarce drops among large-scale raid
bosses that required many players to defeat.
The rules for DKP distribution varied from guild to
guild, but in a nutshell, if you attended a raid on time,
participated in the defeat of a boss, and remained in the
raid until the very end, you received a number of DKP.
When an item you desired dropped, a DKP bid would
ensue and the player with the highest bid received the item.
If a guild established an internal DKP economy,
the “currency” could then also be used as a means
of punishment. If you somehow impeded the raid’s
progress, it was common for an angry raid leader to
dock your DKP—which essentially amounted to your
paycheck. If you performed well, you got a pat on the
back with some points to buy goodies. If you did poorly,
you got squat. This internal economy only intensified
the demanding environment of hardcore raiding guilds.
Furthermore, players who receive many items from a
guild are often expected to remain loyal to the guild,
becoming key members of a group. Pressure to remain
active is common in WoW raiding guild culture.
SynCaine eventually quit his raiding guild. “I had
had enough,” he wrote, “and I realized, sadly so so late,
that WoW was now 99% job, 1% fun for me. The only
time I really enjoyed myself was when we downed a
boss for the first time, and that happened perhaps once
every two weeks or so. Near the end, everything else was
work. Dealing with guild drama, judging new recruits,
repeating a strategy in raid chat for the 1000th time,
updating DKP, it was all work.”
The desire of more casual players to raid and
experience World of Warcraft’s endgame content has,
fortunately, led to a decrease in time commitment as
the expansion packs have progressed. Burning Crusade
reduced raiding parties from forty players down to
either ten-player groups or the slightly more challenging
twenty-five-player groups, making assembling a raid far
less logistically intensive.
When WoW’s third expansion, Cataclysm, arrived, a
new “Looking for Raid” tool changed raiding forever
by allowing players to enter a cross-server pool of
people wanting to face raid content. The tool would
then construct a balanced group and send them off to
an easy-mode version of the raid, allowing players to
experience the same boss encounters and receive slightly
lower-quality versions of the most contemporary raiding
equipment.
Combined with the easier raid bosses and comparable
raiding equipment, the “Looking For Raid” tool
lowered the barrier to raiding considerably, and made
clearing raid content a casual endeavor. Players can now
experience the entirety of an expansion’s raiding content
within a few hours where it used to necessitate months
of time and dedication—a healthy step for World of
37
Warcraft players toward Roger Caillois’s ideal of play for
its own sake and away from obligation.
The LFR tool received a lot of backlash from hardcore
raiding communities, stating that it undermined the
existence of hardcore raiding guilds, that the game had
become “too easy” in the wake of their hard work. Others
found this to be an opportunity to finally quit their
intense commitments to their guildmates, returning to
what WoW likely was for them initially—a fun game.
The Second Best
Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft’s second

expansion pack, was released on November 13, 2008.
The summer prior to its release, my raiding guild
cleared Black Temple and the Sunwell, the two end-
game raids of the Burning Crusade expansion pack,
every single week in hopes of obtaining the last pieces
our mathematically proven “best” equipment sets. For
the rogues of the guild, this included two legendary
drops off the final boss of Black Temple: Illidan
Stormrage’s twin Warglaives of Azzinoth. Unlike other
RPGs where you can earn a pair of gloves or gauntlets
as one item, in WoW you’ve got to find and equip each
one separately—which meant that the Warglaives of
Azzinoth were only available individually as main-hand
and off-hand models.
A rogue lucky enough to beat the odds of both
Warglaives’ 5% drop chance and obtain the dual
weapons would have the statistically greatest DPS
weapons on the face of Azeroth. My guild sported
two “core” team rogues, a guild veteran—let’s call him
“Pumpernickel”—and myself. Pumpernickel outranked
me, and had been a part of the guild for about a year
longer than I had. He had the main-hand Warglaive, and
by merit of this had the rights to the off-hand Warglaive
should it drop, as completing the set increased overall
raid DPS rather than allowing another rogue a shot at
the incomplete set.
Pumpernickel was absent the night the off-hand
Warglaive dropped due to an unexpected medical
emergency. The legendary weapon deferred to me,
which suddenly made my character one of the two
most well-equipped DPS-ers on the server, second only
to Pumpernickel by 0.6%. I’d like to say that I didn’t
care about these statistics, but boy did I care. I cared
a whole lot. As I’ve said, the game to me had evolved
from entertainment into a competitive obligation. My
rank on the server was an affirmation of my time and
energy, and gained me the praise and respect of my
peers. Becoming the second greatest rogue on the server
meant that I had become a cherished asset to the people
that I’d grown to care about and depend on.
39
This turned our weekly clearing of the raid dungeon
of Black Temple into a white-knuckled gauntlet of
anxiety. Every week Illidan Stormrage died the same
dramatic death and the raid scrambled to the corpse
of our fallen enemy to pilfer our rewards. Every week
Pumpernickel hoped for the Off-hand Warglaive and I
hoped for the Main-hand Warglaive. Every week it failed
to appear in the dead boss’s loot inventory. I refused to
miss a single raid every week leading up to Wrath of the
Lich King’s release in November out of fear that I would
miss out on the Main-hand Warglaive drop. This trend
repeated itself until the last week of September, when
our guild’s third and final Warglaive dropped—but it
wasn’t the one I needed.
The Off-hand Warglaive made its way into
Pumpernickel’s inventory, and thus his ranking as the
server’s top rogue solidified. I returned to the game’s hub
city of Shattrath to watch our guild enchanter bless the
weapon with a Mongoose enchantment, which grants
the user +25 to Agility on a random hit with the weapon
it is enchanted with. He stood on top of a mailbox in
the middle of the city like an asshole, dancing with his
weapons drawn for the entire online population to see.
With Wrath of the Lich King, the level cap raised from
70 to 75, and I quickly replaced my level 70 legendary
Off-hand Warglaive of Azzinoth with a higher-level (but
uncommon-grade) dagger called the Ominous Dagger
of the Owl from a quest that made me dispatch ten
viking-esque enemies in the newly accessible continent
of Northrend. I deposited the expended legendary that
I’d spent months obsessing over into my bank to look
back on and remember.
Soon my entire level 70-optimized raiding set made
its way into my character’s storage: Gear of legendary
quality was quickly outmoded by new gear that was
graded merely uncommon. The cycle I put myself
through in the Burning Crusade repeated in Wrath of
the Lich King. I hit the level cap, then started grinding
out dungeon content with some of my guildies to get
enough rare-level gear to produce enough DPS for the
new forthcoming raids.
The guild went back into a full-time raiding schedule
as soon as enough of the core group was at maximum
level and suited up in enough level 75 dungeon
gear. The same covetous feelings came over me when
browsing the potential item drops from bosses, and I hit
the spreadsheets to calculate what gear would optimize
my character’s damage output.
New patches arrived, new raids with better equipment
became available, and within a few weeks most of my
painstakingly curated set from the previous raid’s coffers
ended up back in my storage vault alongside sets of
armor that were no longer useful to me or my guild,
tiny digital mementos of my obsession.
41
PA R T 3 :
LOVE IN THE TIME
OF BLIZZCON
Margot
When I was fifteen years old—two years into playing

World of Warcraft—a digital flirtation struck up between
me and a healer in my guild named Margot. It started
as most online romances do, a few small-talk messages
sent back and forth. Because I was a stupid fifteen-year-
old, my contributions to these early conversations likely
amounted to something like, “Yeah, I hate school!” and
“Yeah, I’d rather be playing World of Warcraft instead of
going to school!” But these messages eventually led to a
more personal dialogue.
Margot became one of my first crushes. Through
months of raiding and chatting, I came to know Margot,
a seventeen-year-old from the UK, better than anyone
in my immediate social circle, both offline and online.
We confided in each other about our problems—my
run-ins with bullies, the limits of her small town, and
both of our conflicts with our families. I didn’t yet
know how to communicate all my teenage frustration
and insecurity to my family, so being able to speak to
someone on my wavelength who was not at all alienated
by my binge-playing WoW was a huge relief. Margot
and I bonded deeply over the escape we shared.
43
Relationships born online are increasing exponen-
tially in social acceptance as our access to and immersion
in the internet continues to grow. Findings published
in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences state that almost 35% of married couples have
met online, with about 45% of those couples having
met on dating sites. This research was gathered based on
a survey of more than 19,000 individuals who married
between 2005 and 2012.
It is no surprise then that World of Warcraft, with
its lengthy raiding schedules and necessity for intimate
cooperation, has led to some romantic encounters. Despite
the stigma of video games being primarily an outlet for
nerdy dudes, the Entertainment Software Association’s
statistics from 2004 to 2016 have reported that women
consistently make up 38% or more of the population of
gamers, with adult women over age 35 comprising exactly
half of the game-playing demographic as of 2016. Games
research firm Newzoo, meanwhile, reports that as as of
mid-2015, 35% percent of WoW players are female, up
from 29% in 2014. WoW’s 7.1 million user base dwarfs
Match.com’s two million subscribers, and WoW players
already have a common interest. While there is no telling
exactly how many relationships or marriages sprung from
World of Warcraft’s servers, there are enough stories out
there to infer that quite a few couples owe their romance
to WoW.
Stephanie Rosenbloom’s 2011 New York Times
article “It’s Love at First Kill” tells the tale of the
budding romance of two WoW players: “It began on a
hot summer night in Santa Barbara, California, when
Tamara Langman helped kill the yellow-eyed demon
known as Prince Malchezaar. She was logged into
World of Warcraft, the multiplayer fantasy game, and
her avatar—Arixi Fizzlebolt, a busty gnome with three
blond pigtails—had also managed to pique the interest
of John Bentley, a.k.a. Weulfgar McDoal.”
Rosenbloom continues, “And so Ms. Langman and
Mr. Bentley found a quiet spot for their avatars to sit.
Hours evaporated as they discussed everything from
their families to their futures. Sometime before dawn,
Ms. Langman realized that while she was in the fictional
world of Azeroth, she was also on a date.”
The story goes on to describe how the two chatted in
this fashion for months before he visited her for a two-
week vacation that turned into a two-year relationship.
“[World of Warcraft is] giving people something that
they’re missing in the real world,” says Ramona Pringle,
an interactive media producer and a professor, in the
same article. “It is a really primal experience. It’s about
survival. It’s about needing someone.”
My mildly romantic friendship with Margot only
increased my addiction to World of Warcraft. The
incentive to play the game alongside Margot heavily
45
outweighed any rewarding feelings I got from the real
world. Not only did I have a group of peers who respected
the work I did with them—I had a girlfriend. I had
someone who listened to me and, without judgment,
related to me. And I could do the same with her.
I was in a completely different world, detached from
the social hysteria emanating from my high school. It
almost felt as if I no longer needed the acceptance of
my real-life peers. I could avoid the social ambiguity
and awkwardness of face-to-face encounters, leaping
directly into a place that felt safe and comfortable. An
evening spent playing World of Warcraft made far more
sense than another school dance.
Margot and I exchanged numbers, taking a step away
from the abstraction of our avatars. I’d spend moments
between classes texting her, and she got into the pattern
of calling me after school. The best part of my day was
spent walking the two-mile bike path home, talking
to Margot on the phone and anticipating the moment
when I could get home, throw off the weight of the day
like a heavy coat, and log onto World of Warcraft.
Our conversations diverged from WoW and
nerd culture into more personal areas. We started to
understand each other’s family lives, and shared our
creative projects with each other—she wrote fan fiction
stories depicting our guild’s WoW characters, and I drew
cruddy comic books and wrote terrible poetry.
World of Warcraft and Margot’s affection allowed
me to sweep the unprocessed pain of my daily teenage
life under the rug. I didn’t have to address the growing
emotional distance between me and my parents or
worry about my isolated nature at school. Here I could
cut loose and be myself.
It never occurred to me that I could actually meet
Margot in real life. Flying across the world to meet a girl
I met online seemed like a logistical impossibility. Then,
seemingly out of nowhere, Margot told me she was
flying to California to go to BlizzCon 2007, the annual
World of Warcraft-centric convention at the Anaheim
Convention Center, only a twenty-minute drive from
my hometown of Irvine. Margot and I made plans to
meet at the convention. I was terrified.
The first BlizzCon was held in October 2005. I
attended its pilot year with my biological father, an
old-fashioned fella who still has never created an email
address and refuses to learn how to text. He was in for a
culture shock. This first year of BlizzCon required only
one hall of the Anaheim Convention Center to host its
8,000 attendees. The convention had the campy air of a
small community embracing their niche fandom. There
was a mechanical bull akin to WoW’s Tauren, a bipedal
bull-like species in Azeroth. My dad was horribly
confused by all of it.
47
Come BlizzCon 2007, World of Warcraft maintained
a subscription base of ten million annual users and had
sold 2.4 million units of its first expansion within 24
hours of its release. World of Warcraft was no longer a
hidden subculture. Blizzard now sold out their entire
reservoir of 13,000 BlizzCon badges at $150 a badge in
less than ten minutes.
BlizzCon’s largest attendance to date was 27,000
attendees in 2010. This was the same year that WoW
reached its highest subscription base at twelve million
users. The convention has since plateaued at around
26,000 attendees annually. As Blizzard’s cultural
weight increased, BlizzCon drew increasingly popular
musicians. Performers like Ozzy Osbourne, Blink-182,
and Foo Fighters took the place of their developer-led
band, Elite Tauren Chieftain, which played every year
for the first three years.
Margot and a handful of my guildmates booked
their rooms at a Radisson across the street from the
Anaheim Convention Center. In total, there were four
rooms on the same floor housing twelve core members
of our guild. My guildies and I made plans to bring our
computers for an in-hotel LAN party so that we could
tackle a raid in the same room together.
Meanwhile, I was scrambling to find a way to make
myself more presentable to Margot. It had never before
occurred to me that she might not be attracted to me. Sure
we had exchanged photos, but I only felt bold enough to
send her pictures that had undergone extensive scrutiny
and a forensic-like identification of the best camera angle
for the shape of my head. Was it proportional to the rest
of my body? Don’t men have sharp jawlines? How can I
make it so I look like I have more jawlines? I didn’t know
what attractive was, let alone how to present myself as
such. I thought about stylish clothes for the first time in
my teenage years. I needed a haircut. I felt too short. My
insecurities that the internet so expertly concealed were
all going to be revealed.
BlizzCon is a beautiful, tangible manifestation of
WoW culture, enabling and underscoring what makes
this MMO and others so successful—its social nature.
BlizzCon sported a lounge area in the middle of the
hall dotted with two-dozen island tables. Every hour,
in alphabetical order, signs with names like “Moon
Guard” or “Doomhammer” were placed on each table.
This was where you’d go to meet people from the server
you played on.
My impression was that the majority of groups
roving the halls of BlizzCon were doing the same thing
that I was doing—meeting with a core group of friends
made online and cruising the convention halls with
them in packs.
BlizzCon held a unique combination of business
professionals, entertainment media gurus, professional
49
e-sports players and their fans, and diehard World of
Warcraft players. You could feel the fabrics of these
colliding cultures weaving together a weird but warm
quilt of flashing lights and overblown spectacle.
The first day of the event, my mom dropped me
off near the convention center around 9 a.m. I picked
up my badge from the check-in and people-watched
for a few minutes. My anxiety about meeting Margot
was briefly dulled by the crowd of Warcraft cosplayers,
fans sporting their faction’s t-shirt, dudes in sweatshirts
embroidered with their class patches, and people
holding up signs with their avatar’s name written on
them for potential in-game friends to spot. These were
my people. Everyone was so damn nice to each other.
I arrived on the floor of Margot’s hotel room
practically breathless, as if I had sprinted up a flight of
stairs to meet her. I stood in front of her hotel room
door with my jaw clenched, heart racing, and a nervous
recognition that this was the first time I’d be around a
girl who liked me.
She swung the door open, I flashed a big dumb smile
at her, and we hugged. I was relieved to find that Margot
was shorter than me. We started talking at bullet-speed
about rumors of the upcoming expansion pack, Wrath
of the Lich King, which was supposedly going to be
announced at BlizzCon later that day. The more we
talked about the thing we mutually loved, the more my
self-doubt melted away.
Margot and I met with the rest of our guildies in
front of the convention center, embracing each other
and chatting excitedly. Most of us already had a general
idea of what the others looked like from posting pictures
of ourselves on our guild forums. At some point in the
meeting, each one of us was told, “You are exactly how
I imagined you’d be!”
We roved into the convention center, thirteen of us
guildies, a tight-knit group of friends who had known
each other for three years yet were meeting for the first
time. The group was inseparable, taking measures not to
lose a single person in the thick of the BlizzCon crowd.
The same cohesion that was demanded of our team
online had carried over into our real-world dynamic,
and it was a beautiful thing.
The opening ceremonies of BlizzCon began. My
guild had claimed an entire row near the front and center
of the auditorium. Chris Metzen, the lead designer
and narrative godfather of the entire Warcraft series,
made his way onstage to announce the forthcoming
expansion of World of Warcraft. When the cinematic
for Wrath of the Lich King began, the entire audience
erupted into applause. WoW players had been jonesing
for a narrative conclusion to Warcraft III’s The Frozen
Throne expansion after its foreboding ending depicted
51
the Lich King scaling the icy pinnacle of Northrend’s
frozen throne. The expansion offered that and more.
The rest of the weekend was spent walking the floor of
the convention center, playing demos of the upcoming
expansion, testing out Diablo III and StarCraft 2, and
going to late-night hotel parties. I drank alcohol for the
first time during an excursion into the ballroom of a
Hyatt, sipping a rum and coke with reckless teenage
abandon.
Throughout the weekend, Margot and I stole away
to take walks around the convention center, talking
about what we were most excited about in the upcoming
expansion, what we couldn’t stand about our high
schools, and what we planned to do after graduation. I
knew I wanted to make video games, I just didn’t know
how I’d do it. She knew she wanted to move to the
United States, she just didn’t know how she’d do it.
I jokingly told her that I’d marry her so that she
could get citizenship. She joked about the audit into
our relationship, that the Bureau of Citizenship would
see logs and logs of chat exchanges via World of Warcraft
and deem our relationship an absurd fantasy set up
purely for the visa.
Despite my guildies’ intentions of playing a lot of
WoW in-person during BlizzCon, we never got around
to it. The majority of our time was spent shooting the
shit in our hotel rooms, sipping at pocket-sized mini-bar
bottles of booze and nerding out about what we would
do later in the game’s upcoming expansion.
BlizzCon ended. Margot gave me a peck of a kiss
before my mom came and picked me up in front of
the Radisson. She was back on a plane for the UK later
that morning, and our relationship returned to private
messages via World of Warcraft and routine phone calls.
That weekend was more energizing than a druid’s
Invigorate spell. The person I was crushing on online
met me in person and, despite my crushing anxiety
leading up to the meet, really dug me back. My doubts
about myself weren’t given a leg to stand on, and I began
to feel hints at a newfound confidence in talking to girls
outside of World of Warcraft.
Six months later, Margot graduated high school and
quit playing World of Warcraft, and I never saw or heard
from her again.
On That Happy Note, Let’s Talk About Divorce
Now that we’ve covered the dating pool that is Azeroth,

let’s talk about the opposite effect playing World of
Warcraft has on existing relationships: extremely high
divorce rates.
On January 31, 2012, user Lokien began a discussion
thread called “World of Warcraft and Divorce” on WoW’s
public forums,
53
So, Im just curious how many people out there
have a wife or a husband who does not play this
game and give them a hard time for playing? How
many people have gotten the dreaded divorce
because of the game or in some way related to it?
I wanna hear some tips to help a married couple

stay married and not let a game ruin their rela-
tionship! Ill Start..
To keep my wife off my meat grinder what I say is

“Hun, I will do the dishes tonight as long as I can
play Warcraft a extra hour” That usually works.
Or more simplistic I say “Hey babe you haven’t

visited your mom in awhile, Why don’t you go
see her?”
And if those don’t work I just wait until she passes

out for bed and I hop on till 2am Who cares if
your tired for work?
I hope that Lokien was successful in keeping his wife

off of his meat grinder, but the statistics are not in his
favor. When someone refuses quality time with their
spouse in favor of raiding and chilling with guildies, it
does not improve the health of the marriage.
A study performed by Divorce Online in 2011 found
that of the wives who cite “unreasonable behavior” for
ending their marriage, 15% believe their partners put
gaming before them. That is a 10% increase from a
similar study done in 2005, when they found that same
justification only accounting for 5% of divorces. World
of Warcraft has been named the prime culprit behind
this staggering statistic, followed by the Call of Duty
series in a close second.
Typically, a marriage begins to deteriorate when
a spouse notices that their partner’s online gaming
activity has become an addiction, taking precedent over
all other duties and relationships. Despite numerous
appeals from the spouse, the excessive gaming is not
mitigated and the partner’s requests are dismissed.
There seem to be two ways a WoW player can solve
this problem. The first is to take your spouse’s complaint
as a wake-up call and heavily cut back on your gaming.
The second—as Earthweaver, a level 100 Tauren
Shaman on Lokien’s thread suggests—is a bit sneakier:
I introduced my wife to the game. Set her up

with hunter (You get pets!!). Helped her learn to
play and hand held through some leveling.
She is now just as addicted as I am.

Problem Solved.
55
Earthweaver may be an enabler, but he has clued in
on something real. In 2012, researchers from Brigham
Young University published a study of 349 couples
evaluating the impact of MMORPGs such as World of
Warcraft on their marital satisfaction. They found that
76% of married couples where both spouses play found
that gaming had a positive effect on their marriage.
Inversely, 75% of couples where only one spouse played
reported that their partner’s gaming habits were a
significant source of unhappiness in the marriage.
So to save your marriage you can either rope your
partner into slaying epic dragons with you and become
the next Azerothian power couple, or you can cut back
on gaming and reinvest in your IRL marriage. After all,
it is perhaps worth listening to your partner’s concern.
They understand you, they care about you, and they
may remember a time when you had aspirations outside
the vortex of infinite online escape.
Or, as Lokien so charmingly suggests, I am pained to
report that there is a third option:
Blizzard should sell Spouse cages on their website.

So whenever you want to play just lock them up.
Yes, totally. Thank you, Lokien.
PA R T 4 :
GRIEFERS, TROLLS,
AND OTHER MONSTERS
Tribes of Warcraft
When playing as one of my alternate characters,

a female Tauren Druid, I joined a pick-up group of
assembled strangers to attempt a dungeon. I was the
group’s main healer, and I did my job on autopilot. The
content wasn’t demanding, and we all appeared to know
the dungeon’s encounters well. When the tank piled on
more enemies than he could chew, our party wiped,
and the group leader called me “a dumb fucking bitch”
and told me “this is why chix cant play WOW!!!” before
removing me from the group.
I was a tourist in the land of misogyny. Actual
women live there.
To get a better perspective on harassment in WoW’s
culture, I spoke with Devony Schmidt, a former
guildmate of mine with whom I’ve maintained a real-
life friendship post-WoW. “I’d have people in parties of
course make jokes like ‘tits or gtfo’ if I made a comment
that indicated I was female,” Schmidt told me, “or there
was a lot of ‘women don’t exist on the internet’ kind of
stuff, and general surprise if I talked on Ventrilo [...]
The biggest type of targeting was that I would often
get offered ‘gifts’ by male players (one of which later
harassed me for nude photos).”
As in all places on the internet, anonymity in WoW
breeds aggressive behavior, which tends to be directed
toward often-marginalized groups of people. World of
Warcraft’s player base frequently displays downright
despicable acts of racism and sexism in both public
forums and private messages. WoW players often engage
in trolling, a form of internet abuse in which a player
makes it their personal mission to make other players’
experiences in the game a living hell.
In an article titled “Guild Life in the World of
Warcraft: Online Gaming Tribalism,” Thomas Brignall
writes,
Virtual worlds are not free from real-world

stereotypes and prejudices. Stereotypes and
cultural identities follow players into the game.
Anonymity allows individuals to avoid the neg-
ative consequences of being prejudicial to other
players. According to Blizzard Entertainment’s
rules on its website, the company enforces pol-
icies that forbid prejudicial language. Blizzard
Entertainment has not published how frequently
it enforces this rule. In a world where individuals
can behave as they choose, and avoid people they
dislike, hard-core players often employed tribal-
istic techniques in order to associate only with
players they liked. Some groups displayed high
59
levels of unity and cooperation. However, there
were frequent occurrences of groups fragmenting
into smaller subgroups. When our guild’s pop-
ulation fragmented into smaller isolated groups,
competition and resentment ensued.
Enter the griefer, such a frequent occurrence in our

online gaming culture that it warrants its own Wikipedia
article, which defines it as “a player in a multiplayer
video game who deliberately irritates and harasses other
players within the game, using aspects of the game in
unintended ways. A griefer derives pleasure primarily
or exclusively from the act of annoying other users,
and as such is a particular nuisance in online gaming
communities, since griefers often cannot be deterred by
penalties related to in-game goals.”
Let’s chew on how sad this description is: A griefer
derives pleasure primarily or exclusively from the act of
annoying other users.
I fear that my younger self would have been fully
indoctrinated into the world of the griefer were it not for
the fact that I initially started playing World of Warcraft
with my stepdad. Had I been left unmonitored, free to
roam the digital playground on my own, I am certain
that I would have been tempted by the surrounding harsh
culture and devolved into the lowest of all internet lowlifes.
I lived by a similar logic in real life: I’d get bullied by
popular kids that I perceived as cool, so in return I tried
to bully kids to earn the same kind of “coolness” that I
thought my tormentors had received from picking on
me. Perpetuating this cycle of projected internal pain,
of course, did not make me any cooler or feel any better.
Even with my stepdad’s influence, I pulled some
shady moves when I first began playing WoW. I would
send obnoxious in-game messages to players asking for
handouts of gold or items, I’d attempt to ninja-loot
items off of bosses (stealing an item off of a defeated
enemy before the rest of the group can place their bid
for the desired item), and I’d throw a tantrum if I was
killed by another player out in the field or lost a piece of
loot to another player.
One evening shortly after I began playing WoW,
Joe and I—from our two computers under the same
roof—were questing with a small group others when I
lost a rare item in a random lottery to another player.
I flipped out on the group—made a big scene about
it. The player had won the item fairly, but I wanted
it. Soon I heard a knock at my bedroom door and Joe
popped his head in to tell me, “Hey, you know you’re
being kind of a dick.”
In my thirteen years, adults had called me a brat,
obnoxious, rude—“dick” was a new one. I was supremely
oblivious to why I was being called a dick, and thankfully
61
my stepdad was patient enough to explain to me how
my behavior toward random people on this game meant
I was developing an aggressive, unpleasant persona. He
told me he didn’t find it enjoyable to be around. I was
being a dick. I never griefed again.
Block and Get Over It
What improved my online etiquette even further was

joining my raiding guild, which to this day helped
shape how I handle online interpersonal relationships.
Perhaps even all of my relationships. Tolerance for
jerks, like in real life, was pretty low. Our guild actively
purged trolls, and the barrier of entry to our social circle
came so high that we didn’t experience much trouble.
The ability to block anyone who you do not get along
with at the push of a button remains a remarkable tool
of online social activity.
The “Block List” combined with guild formation
has created what Thomas Brignall calls “online gaming
tribalism.” Brignall argues that online communities and
guilds are not simply alternate realities, but entirely new
social identities. These communities offer unification
for people who identify with one another under a
system that can immediately banish anyone who goes
against the grain of the group’s shared ideology.
Though the guild culture that I’ve written about thus
far has been the hardcore raiding guild, it is not the only
kind of guild that has formed within World of Warcraft.
More common than raiding guilds are social guilds,
which formed purely to have a group of people to
consistently chat with. A social guild could be exclusive
to certain ethnicities, religions, ages, or geographical
locations. If there was a tribe you identified with in the
world, chances were you could find it in WoW. And, if
you wished, you could easily block out everything else.
While blocking and grouping off may be necessary,
its ease can be a problem. Brignall notes that tribalism
“detracts from the unity of the general population.
Further, because of the breakdown of the general
population into smaller, more isolated groups, tribalism
frequently creates inner struggles, competition, and
an us versus them mentality within a civilized society.
Eventually, various tribes within the social structure
become openly hostile toward other tribes.”
So what does Blizzard do when a guild cultivates
an internal culture in favor of griefing, or even beyond
griefing and into the realm of flat-out hate speech? The
short answer is nothing. Players can report other players
who are harassing them on an individual basis, but the
lines get a bit more blurred if they are happening inside
of a guild setting.
63
Here is an example of a player who attempted to
report the sexist and racist behaviors of a guild with a
moderator from a Blizzard Customer Support forum
board post made in 2013:
Player: A guild I am in is sexually harassing

people on my realm and promoting racism
in guild chat. I won’t repeat what they’ve said
here… It is my hope with this thread that the
guild will be investigated as a whole on a more
thorough level for sexual harassment and racism
since I am unable to let GMs know in-game and
am only able to report on a line-by-line basis.
Thank you for your time, and I am sorry this

kinda of thing is so cultivated in a guild on my
server =/.
Edit: I should mention I won’t be leaving this

guild. I want to be able to report them as much as
often until something has been recorded/done so
I can better protect the community I am a part of
on my server. It’s a good community and doesn’t
deserve this level of vileness.
Moderator: This is an issue.
Guilds are an at-will collection of individuals.
What is said in guild chat has MUCH more
lenience than what is said in public—or in
whispers.
If your intention of staying in this guild is to

report them, your heart is in the right place, but
it’s not going to be terribly fruitful unless you are
reporting whispers to you.
Of course that kind of behavior is not welcome,

or tolerated, if it is reported by the person receiv-
ing the communication—but THEY need to be
the ones reporting. We look at such reports on a
character basis, not a guild basis.
I’d normally recommend that you have a chat with

your Guild Leader, but it sounds like in that guild
this is tolerated and it may not get you very far.
While it makes sense that World of Warcraft GMs

(Game Masters, in-game moderators that uphold
Warcraft’s terms of service) wouldn’t intervene on
internal guild affairs, it brings up a question of how these
guild-endorsed mindsets could potentially perpetuate
harmful behaviors in the WoW community.
65
This type of moderator response is apparent from
Brignall’s research, where he points out a systemic flaw
in World of Warcraft that breeds negative behaviors
amongst entire communities: a lack of repercussions
and personal responsibility. A player under the internet’s
cloak of anonymity can harass another player without
any personal stake and with minimal (if any) in-game
repercussions. Harassment has become an acceptable
part of the game. Brignall writes:
Prejudicial conversations were commonplace in

WoW. Some players talked about “raping female
enemy characters,” or emulated sex with the
corpses of dead female enemies. Frequently the
chat channels were teeming with racist com-
ments. There also seemed to be a propensity for
quick judgments. Frequently, Horde players per-
petuated the myth that most Alliance members
were teenage jocks, griefers, and unintelligent.
While many players told me ‘it is just a game,’
the conversations about rival faction players
frequently were hostile and extremely personal.
The question remains whether it is Blizzard’s

responsibility to curate WoW’s social environment. The
players are given the responsibility of choosing with
whom to interact. The players are the ones responsible
for typing a block command to avoid a harasser’s hateful
messages. You can report the harassing statements that
trickled through before blocking and GMs will take
whatever measures they deem appropriate, but the
victim will typically never learn what justice has been
dealt.
Griefers could make additional characters and
briefly circumvent the block option, sending additional
messages to their target before receiving an additional
block. This type of behavior typically resulted in a
temporary account ban.
The WoW community’s general mindset about online
harassment when I was active was: Don’t whine to the
GM’s about it. Block any offensive parties and move
along. There often seemed to be an air of indifference
about any abuses in the WoW community. It was
often mused that the world is a huge place and World
of Warcraft is a huge game, and so naturally countless
assholes would pop up and make themselves known
behind the guise of the internet. What could you do?
But when talking about this course of action with
my guildmates, particularly the female players, many
were tired of the “block and get over it” mentality. “It’s
always been common to see/hear racial and sexual slurs
thrown around,” Devony Schmidt told me, “and any
suggestion that people shouldn’t say things like that is
immediately written off as someone being ‘butthurt.’”
67
The female players in my guild said that they
received overtly sexual messages from trolls and other
players they had brief gameplay encounters with on an
almost daily basis. The window between receiving these
messages and the messages getting blocked still left a
nasty invasive taste on the day’s gaming experience. The
“block and get over it” mindset reflects a larger “deal
with it” culture around sexual abuse and harassment
that lets women know the abuses they’ve faced will not
be met with action or even sympathy.
When I asked Schmidt whether she’d had to
frequently block players in WoW, she replied that she
had, but that strangers were not the full extent of the
problem. “It also became fairly common for people I
thought of as friends to attempt to have conversations
with me that were openly sexual in nature,” she told me,
“which was somewhat more insidious. Easier to block
a random internet troll than to block someone you’ve
actually developed a friendship with, but when they
won’t stop talking about how sexy your voice is and how
much they miss you when you don’t log on... Gets old
pretty quickly, especially when all you’re trying to do is
log in to check your mailbox for ten seconds.”
I asked Schmidt if she believed Blizzard Entertainment
should take up the mantle of responsibility in cleaning up
the environment they created. “I think the hard thing
about a situation like this is that it’s the players that have
driven the creation of this culture,” she replied, “and for
it to have any meaningful effect, it’ll almost certainly
have to be the players who critique and condemn it. If
it comes from above, in the form of banning, censoring,
etc., it’s going to make people more vehement, and
honestly they’ll probably just find someone (probably
a woman) in the bureaucratic structure of Blizzard to
blame for it—the culture will continue. [...] The change
has to come from within, and it’s got to naturally create
the kind of community that doesn’t actually isolate play-
ers. I do think developer apathy encourages this kind of
environment—if Blizzard does nothing, well, the internal
moderation system won’t ever kick in. But I think the
approach of top-down censorship won’t work either.”
The Judgment of the Tribunal
Perhaps it isn’t the online social platform’s obligation to

moderate or censor its community in order to maintain
a safe environment, but rather it’s their responsibility
to teach users what it means to conduct themselves
properly.
Riot Games, the developers of League of Legends, a
multiplayer online battle arena game (or MOBA) that
in 2014 boasted 67 million players a month, noted in
LoL’s early days that a significant number of players had
69
quit the game citing the “noxious behavior” of other
players.
In response, Riot assembled their “player behavior
team,” a group of Riot staff members that included PhDs
in psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, to
tackle the issue of their toxic player base.
The team began with some small reforms to LoL’s
design. The first step was shifting how the chat system
operates. Originally, players could send messages to
their own teammates and to their opponents. This
often led to volatile exchanges between opposing teams.
Players reported that around 80% of the chat exchanges
at this time were negative.
All Riot had to do was switch off chat between
teams as a default option. A week after switching the
default, negative chat reportedly decreased by 32.7%
and positive chat increased by 34,5%. Players can still
go into their settings and switch chat between teams
back on, but the extra steps it takes to do that appears
to be enough to quell whatever shitty message you were
about to send.
Another step Riot took was to begin telling banned
players, in detail, why they’ve been banned. This
is a problem that I saw go unaddressed in World of
Warcraft—players in WoW receive general warnings
without any specifics. League of Legends now details
where you went wrong and why it was wrong. Riot
noted a significant decrease in players who have been
banned once becoming repeat offenders.
The third and most ominous-sounding implemen-
tation Riot’s behavioral team made was “The Tribunal.”
The Tribunal is a democratic disciplinary committee
made of volunteer LoL players that votes on reported
instances of bad behavior.
The most dramatic result of the new Tribunal system
was the banning of Christian “IWillDominate” Rivera
of Team Liquid, a globally recognized professional
e-sports team. Pros like Rivera build their entire careers
on their ability to play League of Legends, with salaries
that can exceed six figures a year.
LoL employs an internal “harassment score” within
the game to gauge a player’s behavior, helping build
the aforementioned psychological profiles that the
behavioral team at Riot uses to evaluate their player
base. Rivera ranked among the worst 0.7% of all North
American players. This placed Rivera, despite his pro
status, in front of a Tribunal. The final verdict in his
ruling, which was approved by the case auditors at Riot,
is as follows:
His persistent tendency to engage in verbal

abuse and insults, his lack of cordial demeanor,
and his treatment of less-skilled players is unac-
ceptable for any player, especially a high-profile
71
professional player who has a regular opportunity
to lead the community by example.
On December 24, 2012, all of Rivera’s accounts

were banned from LoL due to his toxic behavior,
and he was subsequently suspended from the League
Championship Series for one year.
The ban on Rivera has since been lifted, and he is
allowed to participate in the League Championship
Series once again. In 2013, Riot offered Rivera a
roadmap to earn back his LCS eligibility, and he took
the opportunity, stating, “There were a series of events
that transpired leading up to my restriction [from the]
LCS, and for me personally it took Riot’s interjection
for me to realize that I could be a positive influence—
not just in league but just with everything. When my
mindset shifted—I started to enjoy the game more, this
time not at anyone’s expense.”
The Tribunal system opens up a dialogue between the
community of players and the developers themselves to
help educate offending players about where they went
wrong. It gives the harassed a voice to explain why they
were offended, and it allows the developers to point out
what constitutes volatile behavior. It isn’t engineered
to punish and banish players, but rather to rehabilitate
them and build empathy in their online community.
More than 280,000 players went from “censured”
statues in League of Legends to “good standing” after the
Tribunal was implemented.
The success of the Tribunal system underscores a lack
of communication and accountability in MMORPGs
like World of Warcraft. We’ve grown apathetic and
desensitized toward outrageous behavior under the
magnitude of trolls and griefers. Harassment is to be
expected, and that’s the problem. When we open up the
lines of communication between parties, an important
dialogue takes place that could never happen in the
wake of a block or a ban.
73
PA R T 5 :
MORE THAN OUR
AVATA R S
The Quest Begins
The pinnacle of my WoW career was from the

beginning of 2007 to the middle of 2008. In this
stage, I was playing roughly 40 hours a week, spending
the weekends of my sophomore year and most of my
junior year of high school almost exclusively in Azeroth.
Understandably, my excess gaming put the spotlight of
my parents’ concern right on me.
Limitations were put in place: No logging on during
the school week, two hours total on the weekends. I
found these rules to be impossible and immediately
made plans to circumvent them.
I started going to internet cafés, spending a suspicious
number of hours away from home. And when that
didn’t work, I’d go to a friend’s house and play on a
computer already loaded up with WoW. I justified these
deceptions to myself by saying that my parents could
hardly understand what this guild meant to me, and that
my stinted playtime would reflect poorly on me in the
eyes of my guildies. But finding enablers was way more
challenging in real life than it was in the game world.
The breaking point was when I attempted to install
World of Warcraft on school PCs using a proxy server
to bypass the administration’s list of blocked activities.
75
I was caught almost immediately and reported to my
parents. This resulted in a three-week grounding and
complete suspension from online activities.
Still, I pride myself on my goal-oriented mind. When
I focus on a task, I will drill away at it until I am satisfied,
even if it’s at the sacrifice of my own rest or mental stability.
When I was under my parents’ heavy restrictions, this
creative energy was put toward finding ways to play World
of Warcraft. I soon found the best way yet.
My guildies were coordinating a post-BlizzCon real-
life meetup at one of the guild officers’ homes in Phoenix,
Arizona. The goal was to set up all of our computers in the
living room, spend the weekend playing WoW together,
drink, be merry, and maybe chill by the pool if we made
it outside. I had never felt, nor will I ever again feel, such
a necessary urge to go to Phoenix, Arizona.
The real-life guild meeting was happening the second
weekend into my grounding period. I knew my parents
wouldn’t allow me, still a fifteen-year-old kid, to travel
to the desert to meet up with a bunch of strangers I’d
met online. Though the majority of my guildmates were
around the age of eighteen, there were some folks in
their early twenties joining us, and there was no telling
what these people might be like in real life. I decided to
use my internet probation to my advantage.
I concocted the story of a friend’s camping trip, a trip
that was actually happening, in Kern Valley. I convinced
my friend to inform my parents of the logistics of the
event, and my parents, perhaps blinded by surprise and
a burning desire to see me engage in an outdoor activity,
allowed me to go.
Beneath the subterfuge, I made plans with my two
closest guildmates, two Californian fellas who were
road-tripping to Arizona for the guild meeting. They
agreed to swing by Irvine to pick me up. That morning
I left home with my backpack and sleeping bag in tow,
feeling like I had pulled off the world’s greatest heist.
My “camping buddy” picked me up in his parents’ car,
told my folks that I would be well-looked after, and
then he turned the corner and stopped the car.
I snuck back behind my parent’s house to my
bedroom window where my computer tower was
waiting for me. Before leaving, I’d bagged all of the
cables and duct-taped a towel around my computer,
then gently lowered the rig a foot beneath my window,
expertly maneuvering what would have been an
impossible object to sneak out the front door. From
there, my accomplice friend dropped me off five miles
away at a rendezvous point, an outdoor mall where my
World of Warcraft buddies later retrieved me.
This was my first time meeting Austin and Andy in
person. They both greeted me with a hug. The nuances
and quirks of our personalities that we knew so well in
each other online translated perfectly in real life. We
each knew the others better than we did classmates
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who we saw every day. We had been playing the game
together for two years at this point.
We moved a lot when I was a kid because of my
mother’s work. I lived in four different cities during
elementary, middle, and high school. The relationships I
made at each school flittered away as soon as I relocated
to another city. The longest-lasting IRL friendship I had
was only a year old. Although I was meeting them for
the first time, Austin and Andy were my oldest friends.
Hopping in that van and taking off for Arizona was one
of the most liberating feelings I’d ever had.
The Fellowship Gathers
Before heading to Arizona, we had to stop in Palm Springs

to pick up our guild’s Warlock. We hit the road on our
surreal adventure, three people who’d just met each other
for the first time driving cross-country to hang out with a
bunch of strangers we’d known for years.
During the six-hour drive to Palm Springs, I daringly
smoked a cigarette and then drove the car, two things I
had never done before. I then drove the car while daringly
smoking a cigarette. This was what I fantasized being an
adult must feel like. I imagined that you turn eighteen, a
switch flips, and suddenly you’re free to do whatever you
want without any inhibitions. I felt a fantastical form of
adulthood only possible before real adulthood.
We arrived in Palm Springs at sundown. Chris the
Warlock greeted us with daft excitement when we
knocked on his apartment door. Here was another
man who was the spitting image of his online persona,
another friend I instantly bonded with after two years of
online companionship.
“Is that your rig?” I asked, pointing to a solid black foot-
long rectangle trimmed with purple LED lights. “Sure is,”
he said. That night in lieu of resting, we played World of
Warcraft. The four of us hopped on to our guild’s Ventrilo
server, finding that other guildmates were also converging
on their way to Phoenix. All of my friends would soon be
together, and I would be right there with them.
As the sun started to rise over Palm Springs, we
each struck up a cigar. There was an exhausted lull in
conversation as we puffed on smoke. I felt more socially
validated from this 24-hour period than I had felt in
my entire life. It was unreal. I thought about how I had
run away from home to experience this. I was surprised
at myself for taking such dramatic measures, and I was
equally surprised by the lack of anxiety or guilt I felt.
We all got a couple of hours sleep before stopping
at a Ruby’s Diner in downtown Palm Springs. The four
of us loaded into Andy’s hippie van along with our
computers and weekend backpacks. We cruised through
the seven-hour ride to Phoenix, talking about World of
Warcraft, school, aspirations, and where we wanted to
be in a couple of small but infinitely distant years.
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I remember my mother calling me when we were
halfway to Phoenix. My throat sank into my stomach
when I picked up, brewing up a swift excuse about cell
phone reception being faulty between the cavernous
rocky maw of Kern Valley. She asked a few questions
about how the trip was going so far, and I responded
with some fines and greats, trying to keep the invasive
presence of my parents out of my sojourn. I hung up,
Austin called me a sly motherfucker, and nothing else
about my parents was brought up for the rest of the trip.
We arrived at a small apartment complex in Phoenix
in the early afternoon that Saturday, greeted by several
guildmates I had previously met at BlizzCon a few months
prior. The spacious living room had the furniture arranged
to accommodate all of the PC towers that were brought
along for the journey. People were eating snacks, drinking,
and chatting with each other from their computers, World
of Warcraft running nonstop on each monitor.
Conversation hardly left the game world, seldom
taking a personal turn. When we talked about our lives,
we generally talked about the obligations that took us
away from World of Warcraft before shifting back into
discussions about raids, the state of the game, and what
we hoped to achieve as a guild the following summer.
The weekend was spent enjoying Phoenix’s early spring
weather by the pool, with temperatures staying a steady
90° Fahrenheit with enough humidity to fill a water park.
When the living room-turned-computer lab got too hot
and stuffy, we’d spend some time offline chatting about
WoW, and when it came time for meals we’d all move out
in one large, hungry raiding party to the nearest restaurant.
The last night we all went to a bowling alley. I
discovered that gin and tonics glowed blue underneath
a black light. The entire group’s inside jokes, references,
and history were exclusively based in World of Warcraft.
We talked at length about events that had happened to
us in-game, about how insane the anti-gravity portion
of Kael’thas Sunstrider’s boss fight was, how stoked
we were to enter the Sunwell raid for the first time,
reminiscing on these events so lucidly that it sounded as
if we were personally there.
Our guild’s World of Warcraft stories contained much
more meaning than the game itself. They all pertained to
what we had done together: something funny someone
did during a raid, embarrassing gossip overheard in chat,
or momentous triumphs we had made as one cohesive
unit. We regaled ourselves with tales of our illustrious
careers together in Azeroth. These were stories steeped
in personality and emotion, evoking deep sentiment
from the group.
What else would we talk about outside of what we
knew about each other already? I didn’t want to discuss
the details of my stagnant high school life, or the fact
that I was grounded at home and couldn’t even play
WoW without sneaking around.
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No, instead I was going to talk with my friends about
my badass rogue, the one who tops DPS charts and
has a ton of excellent narratives about storming enemy
cities. The time we killed Onyxia the Black Dragon
for the first time and staked her giant scaly head in the
middle of Orgrimmar for all to witness. The time our
mage attended a raid a little too drunk and accidentally
killed herself by falling down a large elevator shaft in
Serpentshire Cavern. These were our stories, our history.
I finished the half of a gin and tonic my friend let
me steal sips off of, relishing the bounty of company. I
felt sad that the weekend was coming to an end, wished
that all of these people lived closer to me. I pulled out
my phone for the first time since arriving in Phoenix to
see: “Mom (12 missed calls).”
The Quest Imperiled
“Did you know that your computer is gone?” was

the first thing she asked me. I’d sprinted out of the
bowling alley as soon as I saw that my mother had been
repeatedly trying to get a hold of me since earlier that
afternoon. “Yes,” I said, “uh, I fucked something up and
took it to get repaired.” It was the best half-baked excuse
that my gin-induced brain could concoct.
Pacing around a florescent-lit parking lot in Phoenix
trying to convince my mother was not how I wanted
this trip to end. She asked me how my camping trip was
going, and I told her that it’s been wonderful. I caught
some bass in the river. I even gutted them myself after
Brian’s dad taught me how. We cooked them over an
open fire and ate them for dinner. It was a hoot.
Any perceived suspicion I picked up in her voice
disarmed and I felt the grip in my gut relieving a bit. We
said our I love you’s then hung up. I stood out there for a
while longer, a little wobbly, before returning to my group.
The next morning the three of us loaded all of our
equipment and luggage back into Andy’s car and said
goodbye to the guild, although we were quick to point
out that we’d be seeing each other later that evening
online anyway. The drive back was sleepy and uneventful,
all of us tapped out from marathoning WoW and hanging
with our online-turned-real-life pals instead of sleeping.
I got nervous upon returning to Irvine. This whole
plan wasn’t fulfilled to its end just yet, and I could still
get caught in the act. I was dropped off a few sleepy
streets away from my house, picking a low-traffic spot to
avoid potential detection. I dropped my towel-wrapped
computer back by my bedroom window before circling
back around the house to let myself back in.
I swung the door open, was greeted by my mom and
stepdad, chatted lightly about the trip, retold the fish-
gutting story to my stepdad, unloaded my backpack
and sleeping bag, then hopped in the shower.
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I’d somehow pulled it off. I’d gotten away with it.
In fact, my parents had no clue about the stunt until
I started writing this book. I called my mom and spilled
the beans about the entire operation, everything from
the dummy camping trip to the booze and cigarettes,
and that I thought she had almost sniffed me out when
she called about my computer.
Her first reaction was, “That’s horrible, Daniel. That’s
awful. This is awful. You were a minor! You could’ve
been killed!” And she’s not wrong. It was a shitty thing
to do to a parent. Despite having met our host months
before at BlizzCon, this mostly adult group could have
harbored anyone. To a mom, this trip was a nightmare.
I asked what she would have done if she had caught
me, and she said without hesitation that she would have
flown to Phoenix, whooped my ass, and taken me back
home. I told her that, yeah, if my child did something
like this, I’d be a nervous wreck too.
“Do you at least feel guilty?” my mom wanted to know.
I couldn’t say that I did. This road trip was a highlight
of my high school career. It was stupid, but I cherish the
memory of it.
My mother would like to add that she’s incredibly
embarrassed that this story is included here. Thank you,
Mom, for being a good sport about it all of these years
later.
PA R T 6 :
W H AT K E E P S U S
COMING BACK
Variable Ratio Enforcement
Creation requires intention. Be it in fine art, a piece

of software, or ad-churning clickbait, understanding
work’s purpose bridges the gap between the abstract and
the concrete. When you set out to create a new game,
it is important to ask what the game is, how it plays,
what the player will spend their time doing, and what
you want to convey to the player. You must ask, “Why
should this game exist?” Do you want to entertain the
player with nifty and innovate mechanics? To educate
the player with an impactful message? To enthrall the
player with a well-delivered narrative? Maybe the goal
is simply to hook users into making impulsive in-app
purchases, or to retain users in an MMO to keep that
subscription revenue stream a-flowin’.
Jonathan Blow, the creator of the critically acclaimed
games Braid and The Witness, is an outspoken critic on
the state of the games industry, the potential direction
of video games, and the steps we must take as game
designers for the medium to reach its full potential. In
a 2007 lecture at the Montreal International Games
Summit titled “Design Reboot,” Blow answers the big
question: What are games?
“Games are trying to achieve a goal,” he says, “and
there are rules governing the actions. There are effects
on what you can do in the world and what the worlds
can [do] back. Games create a low-stakes subdomain
that create a ‘meaning of life’... you know why you’re
there, and you know what you’re trying to do.” For
Blow, realizing how much a game’s “meaning of life”
was wrapped up in its gameplay fundamentally changed
how he approached game creation.
Blow’s concept can be expressed in a similar, albeit
more technical way, as the “gameplay loop.” A game’s
gameplay loops are its possible mechanics. Though
there’s no limit to what can comprise a loop, and a game
can contain many loops at once. For example, Super
Mario Bros.’s most basic gameplay loop might look like:
Run right → smoosh bad guys underfoot →

smash blocks → reach the level’s end
→ repeat
Whereas a loop from a Final Fantasy game might

look like:
Advance the plot → level up → find loot

→ repeat
And a Mass Effect game’s loop might look like:
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Advance the plot → level up → find loot →
GET DOWN WITH SOME FINE SPACE
HOTTIES, DAYUUUUUM → make some
plot/character choices → repeat
For game creators, being able to articulate your

game’s gameplay loops helps to focus your attention
on what matters. When you are considering adding
new mechanics, you can ask, “How will this mechanic
improve, complicate, or otherwise impact the game’s
loop?” After all, the aspect of the game that matters most
is whatever the player is spending the most time doing.
For example, in Half-Life 2 you spend most of your
time shooting future alien Gestapo baddies with various
guns—therefore, the game is primarily a first-person
shooter. This much is obvious. But what makes Half-Life 2
such a successful first-person shooter is that the developers
paid so much attention to making the primary gameplay
loop as interesting, innovative, and fun as possible. They
asked themselves, “What will keep the action of blasting
baddies from being repetitive and bland?”
While developing Failsafe, my studio’s pilot project,
we wanted to make sure that the player didn’t feel like the
designers were wasting their time. We didn’t want to fill
our loops with fluff and filler content to buffer Failsafe’s
playtime. Failsafe is a narrative-heavy exploration game,
so we focused on making our gameplay loops emphasize
those elements:
Explore → overcome environmental obstacles

& puzzles → advance the plot → repeat
A game like Failsafe has a very clear end after its plot is
resolved and its secrets are uncovered. Its business model
doesn’t rely on player retention. The player can enjoy it,
shelve it like a nice book, and then suggest it to friends.
World of Warcraft requires a different formula. Its
gameplay loop looks like:
Kill stuff → level up → get loot

→ repeat until endgame
Then:
Kill stuff → get loot → kill harder stuff →

get better loot → repeat
The “meaning of life” in World of Warcraft, then,

is to grow a powerful character. Defeat the endgame
content and gear yourself up enough so when new,
more challenging content arrives, you’ll be prepared to
repeat the loop. Each new patch of content scales up
incrementally from the last, so that new dungeons and
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raids are challenging enough to necessitate that a group
be geared out in the loot provided in the last patch. If a
player does not keep up, they risk falling behind in their
viability for newer content.
This model for an MMORPG makes sense. An
MMO takes huge upfront investment as well as financial
upkeep. Logically, you want to ensure that your players
are good and hooked, and that their $15 a month keeps
coming. I don’t consider this to be a malicious tactic
on behalf of game development studios to ensnare their
player bases to continue generating capital.
But as Blow says in his talk, “We don’t intend to
harm players but we might be harming them. When tens
of millions of people buy our game, we are pumping a
mental substance into the mental environment—it’s a
public mental health issue. It’s kind of scary but it’s kind
of cool because we have the power to shape humanity.”
Like any creators, we can’t know all the effects our games
will have on the world, yet we are at least in a small way
accountable for how our games are used by players. In
the case of WoW, Blizzard is partly responsible for how
wholly the game takes over players’ lives.
Games are addictive for a multitude of reasons. Call
of Duty has a delicious mindlessness to it. Spelunky is
masterfully challenging. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
has a beautiful combination of exploration, gameplay,
and story that kept me hooked for months. Candy Crush
has its bright happy responsiveness and the diabolical
ease of its microtransactions. World of Warcraft immerses
players in its stylized fantasy world and combines it
with the high stakes of working and competing with
other real people.
Such stakes reached beyond the game’s core
gameplay. To remain on the cutting edge of competitive
raiding, we had to make modifications to the base
WoW game. Raiding guilds often require user interface
augmentations, onscreen timers, and boss indicators to
be installed by raiders to so the party could perform
optimally.
For example, as a Rogue, a class whose sole purpose
in World of Warcraft is to dish out as much hurt as
possible, there was a sequence of abilities that, when
executed, offered the mathematically highest output
of damage possible against a boss. A Rogue during
the Wrath of the Lich King expansion era would focus
primarily on three abilities: Slice N’ Dice, Rupture,
and Deadly Poison. I stripped away my user interface
of all of Blizzard’s aesthetic flare and replaced it with
a stripped-down UI that provided a minimal menu of
abilities and a series of timers that would stream a ticker
of timers. The meaning of my life in World of Warcraft
was no longer to be immersed in the game’s world, but
to compete at the highest level possible.
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In Alex Golub’s article “Being in the World (of
Warcraft),” a great quote from HolyHealz, raid leader
of the guild Power Aeternus, encapsulates the spirit of
this style of gameplay:
Personally I really enjoy pushing the pace,

challenging myself: how hard, how efficient I
could be, how much I could push damage, how
I could survive. That sort of thing was the first
reason why I chose to raid, and that continues
to be a motivating factor. Eventually it really
became about when you achieve common goals,
as a group you really build strong camaraderie
and strong connections. When you’re raiding
in Molten Core and you’re killing bosses for
the first time and doing server firsts or close to
server firsts, it was an incredible high. And the
amount of people yelling on vent when we killed
Ragnaros was amazing. It was like nothing has
even been louder. There will always be those first
kills that I remember.
I similarly remember the euphoric rush of my

guild’s first boss kills. The onscreen event of a boss’s
health hitting 0%, the ensuing screams over Ventrilo,
the praise between guildmates, the distribution of loot.
It was a party. This is what hardcore raiders returned
to, over and over again. Not only the experience of the
kill, but the reveling in it, the praise and celebration
amongst your team. What a loop.
Nowadays, World of Warcraft doesn’t offer the
experiences I look for in a game. I typically stick to
shorter games that either lean heavily on neat storytelling
or interesting gameplay concepts. World of Warcraft
without a raiding guild is a dull experience for me. As
Jonathan Blow points out, “MMOs are notorious for
having relatively empty gameplay, but keeping players
hooked with constant fake rewards—this creates ‘the
treadmill.’ Rewards are a way of lying to the player
so they feel good and continue to play the game.” He
noted some extreme examples of this, such as reported
incidents of Chinese and Korean MMO players dying
at the computer. “As long as players are hooked, it
doesn’t matter how good the core gameplay is. As long
as they want to get the nicer sword, they’ll still play the
game, and as long as they play it’s all the same to us
as designers—I’m sure at this point, people think I’m
needlessly babbling on about this point. But I want to
put forth this question: Would they still play a game if
it took out all the scheduled rewards?”
The gameplay loops of World of Warcraft follow the
psychological theory of “variable ratio enforcement.”
We know that rats, monkeys, and people work harder
and longer at whatever they’re doing when a reward is
93
in place. But unlike on a fixed-ratio reward schedule,
where, for example, a rat gets a food pellet every ten
times it hits a lever, on a variable-ratio schedule, the
reward is provided after an unpredictable number of
responses. Not knowing when we will get our reward
makes us hit the level/raid the dungeon all the more
often.
The type of player that World of Warcraft creates is
generally one that’s hungry for this reward reinforcement.
A raider is looking to fulfill that side of the gameplay
loop, to receive better gear for their character, to progress
further and further down the endless chain of content.
The question this poses is: What does this cultivate
inside of a player besides repetitive consumption?
What happens when a gameplay loop never reaches an
endpoint but rather traps its player inside of a whirlpool
of content?
The task ahead of game developers is a challenging
one. It is becoming increasingly impossible to strike a
balance between creating fulfilling game experiences
and meeting your bottom line. To me, though, this
balance begins with allowing players to keep their
gaming and their lives separate. The free-to-play model,
which typically relies on the retention of its players for
microtransactions, is the antithesis to this idea.
As World of Warcraft’s player base shrinks, MMO-
RPGs have the potential to cultivate healthier behaviors,
the way Minecraft encourages its players to explore the
depths of their own creativity within the gamespace.
That, or we’ll keep seeing more of the same proven
business model based on products that profit from our
unhealthy tendencies. If there is to be a break in the
cycle, it will be up to the players to decide what they
find worthy of their time and money.
Silver Lining
I was convinced that I wanted to make video games

when I was four years old. I remember my friend Kyle
booting up his Nintendo 64 loaded with Super Mario
64. A giant mustachioed head appeared, and I spent
half an hour pointing a gloved hand around, grabbing
at its cheeks, nose, chin, eyelids, all before my friend
told me to actually play the game. What, I’m not already?
I didn’t know what form my desire to make
games would take, or how to begin learning the basic
workflows to create games, but I immersed myself in
gaming culture. G4 TV, in the days before it merged
with TechTV and began airing four-hour blocks of
COPS reruns, started airing a show called The Electric
Playground. EP visited video game development studios,
toured their nerd-haven campuses, and interviewed
developers like Peter Molyneux (creator of Populous,
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Dungeon Keeper, and Black & White), John Romero
(who designed Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake), and
John Carmack (who programmed all three games). It
was a window into a world I wanted to be a part of.
I soon became obsessed with the culture of game
development. I wanted to know the people making
the games, to see where they worked, and to learn
the minutiae of what they did all day. When I found
that Blizzard Entertainment was headquartered in my
hometown of Irvine, California, working for Blizzard
became the focal point in my fantasy of a career in game
development. Blizzard often held creative competitions
in art and design, and invited the talented young
winners to their campus, so I began to work on an entry
that I hoped would get their attention.
I first started practicing game design with Neverwinter
Nights, an isometric point-and-click role-playing game
derived from Dungeons & Dragons’s Forgotten Realms
canon. Neverwinter has an in-depth level creator inside
of the game client that accounts for most of the game
development workflows. You can design levels using
every single asset and model Neverwinter has to offer,
and you can script entirely new gameplay encounters
using the LUA scripting language inside the Neverwinter
level editor. The game had a community of independent
developers who used this editor to share hours of
gameplay that could be accessed through the game.
I was engrossed in Neverwinter’s gameplay and
story. Discovering such an in-depth level editor and an
entire community creating new content was incredibly
inspiring. Many of the user-created levels, brimming
with creativity, were nearly indistinguishable from the
core content developed by Obsidian Entertainment.
I taught myself LUA scripting and adapted to the
small learning curve of the level editor, and from there
spent hours crafting levels to share with my friends
and family. Being able to share the levels I made and
watching people enjoy them was a huge pleasure, I
found their feedback enormously useful at this early
stage. For many people starting to make games, a lack
of immediate feedback can be a barrier to digging
further into game design. It can take a lot of time to
get a game up and running well enough to share with
people. For me, Neverwinter’s level editor did a good job
of mitigating this problem, and my success within the
level editor was what pushed me out of the Neverwinter
sandbox into modding for other games, and then
eventually into modeling tools like Autodesk Maya and
game engines such as Unreal 3.
Despite any qualms I have with the empty mechanics
of World of Warcraft or the potentially disruptive nature
of its gameplay, WoW was the kind of game I wanted
to create: a huge interactive canvas with beautiful
environments and an entire culture of people sharing
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its world. A massive team of artists, engineers, and
storytellers was working together to create a world
that millions of people got to enjoy. World of Warcraft
was the first game to make me think of games as art. I
wanted in.
I met plenty of creatives inside Azeroth who’d been
similarly inspired, people who made drawings, comics,
fan fictions, and poems about their experiences inside
the game, and animated elaborate machinima videos to
create lore around their own player characters. World
of Warcraft is such a ripe catalyst for creatives that the
amount of art made inside of and about WoW dwarfs
the actual game content.
Senior year of high school, I was able to visit
Blizzard’s gated Irvine campus without needing to win
a competition. Through my mother I met Erin Catto,
a physics programmer at Blizzard Entertainment, and
geeked out to him about my various WoW-related
passions. He was kind enough to fulfill my nerd dream
and invite me to visit the campus.
Erin’s work in physics programming is unparalleled.
Throughout Diablo III, whenever you see a piece of
abandoned furniture explode into a bouquet of splinters,
a wall shatter into a hail of stone, or a demon flail off
into a bottomless pit, that is Erin’s handiwork at play.
Visiting the Blizzard campus was like my own real-life
episode of Electric Playground. Inside the monolithic
blue gate crowned with two-foot lettering “BLIZZARD
ENTERTAINMENT” were four huge office buildings,
some basketball courts, and at the center of the campus:
a twelve-foot statue of an orc riding a dire wolf. Catto
greeted me and we started on a tour of the grounds.
The studio’s decor ran counter to how most corporate
offices present themselves. There were the necessities—a
front desk, meeting rooms, a water cooler—but there
was also a tiki bar, video game consoles and arcade
machines, bookcases filled with every computer game
imaginable, and life-sized statues of beloved characters
from Warcraft, Diablo, and StarCraft.
Catto walked me through a museum dedicated to
Warcraft, a space that contained all of the franchise’s
hundreds of awards, first edition prints of the games,
and some of World of Warcraft’s original, now-retired
servers. We walked through a movie theater, an
orchestral recording studio, and a state-of-the-art gym.
“It’s hard for people to leave sometimes,” Erin joked.
We had lunch at the cafeteria and chatted about our
favorite aspects of World of Warcraft. I was excited and a
little surprised to find that many developers at Blizzard
actively played WoW themselves: excited because it was
neat knowing that the people who created WoW were
passionate enough about it to play it, surprised because
the developers were clocking in nearly as much playtime
as I was.
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Visiting Blizzard’s campus sharpened my resolve. I
wanted to make World of Warcraft. And if not World of
Warcraft, games like World of Warcraft. Here was a huge
campus of people all working toward a goal based on
their shared love for video games. WoW was the product
of their collective skill, imagination, and hard work—it
benefitted from one employee’s art skills, another’s
gift for level design, another’s elegant sense of physics.
Everyone had a place at this campus, and each of their
unique talents shone in the game itself.
Hub Cities
Returning to World of Warcraft after quitting is a lot like

revisiting your hometown after a long time away. The
Blockbuster Video has been demolished and replaced
by a Bank of America. The grove of trees you used to
steal oranges from has been bulldozed for the expansion
of a shopping center. All of your friends are gone. You’re
a stranger.
My guild began to deteriorate when three of its key
leaders cut back on their hours. It started with the raid
leader, who because of a new job and girlfriend, cut
his raiding schedule in half. Raids became increasingly
unorganized and ineffective without our leader’s familiar
charisma and deft ability to maneuver the group into a
consolidated, powerful machine.
Our main tank started to cut down hours shortly
after the raid leader did. The heavy mantle of leadership
fell onto the tank’s shoulders, and the difficulty and
accountability of the new job was not a sustainable or
desirable activity for him. With the main tank gone,
our main healer also departed. The well-oiled gears lost
three integral cogs, and the raiding machine ceased.
Our raid schedule was put on hiatus so the remaining
guild leadership could review and recruit potential
applicants, but during this time the guild lost many
members to more active raiding guilds. I cut my playtime
down as well. It made me anxious to log on and see my
once prominent guild in such disarray. The game became
less and less appealing as the deterioration persisted.
I was halfway through my junior year of high school
when I decided to take a break from the game. Away
from the demanding schedule of my WoW life, I became
more active at school and my academics improved. I
also got involved in theater, school politics (I became
the president of both the culinary club and the game
development club), and started dating. World of Warcraft
was no longer the center of my social life.
After about a month of “taking a break” from World
of Warcraft, I’d log on intermittently and play maybe
once or twice a week for a few hours. By this time, my
guild’s once-bustling roster was down to me and one or
two other people.
101
I had the opportunity to rebuild. I searched a few
large raiding guilds’ websites, found some openings for
raiding positions I likely could have easily obtained.
When entertaining the idea to apply, the years of raiding
and relationship-building with my guild washed over
me. Did I really want to repeat all of that again? Did I
need to start that process over again?
As my playtime was winding down, I visited the
old Burning Crusade-era hub city of Shattrath. Hub
cities are the cities where the majority of the online
player base congregate, where they have easy access to
vendors, portals to other cities, banks, and sometimes
auction houses (used to access the player-based trading
economy). Each expansion of World of Warcraft features
a new hub city of some kind, and the majority of WoW’s
new content is generally focused around the region of
the new hub city. After a new expansion takes the stage,
the previous hub city becomes a ghost town. These
retired hub cities evoke a vibe that is both creepy and
wildly nostalgic.
My visit to Shattrath was in 2008, and the new
hub city was the majestic wizard’s capital of Dalaran.
Shattrath’s mystical enclave of curved ziggurats with crys-
talline peaks and enchanted gravity-defying waterfalls
was abandoned. I didn’t find their banks bustling with
players, their taverns blossoming with conversation, or
their portal rooms filled with hundreds of travelers head-
ing to their next destination in Azeroth.
Instead I found the massive city filled with non-
playable characters standing idle, stoic, fixed—eternal
in their programming. My computer used to experience
performance issues attempting to render the abundance of
players active in Shattrath. Now it was just me, maybe one
other player leveling up a new character, left alone in a vast
city designed to fit multitudes of adventuring companions.
My own “hub city,” my guild, was now vacated too.
Our chat channels were empty, our Ventrilo servers
abandoned. The person responsible for paying for our
guild website canceled the subscription. Everyone had
moved on, either in real life or in the game.
After walking the empty streets of Shattrath, I typed
“<3” into my guild’s chat tab, watched the green text
fade out, and logged off. It was time for me to find a
new hub city, but it would not be in World of Warcraft.
103
NOTES
What I Talk About When I Talk About Warcraft
Statistics on World of Warcraft’s subscribers come from Statista.

com (http://bit.ly/1aA6aj9), whose data is based off public
quarterly reports from Activision Blizzard. These reports are
available from 2009 to the present at http://bit.ly/24VVBPd.
The Escapist
Mario Lehenbauer-Baum and Martina Fohringer’s article

“Towards Classification Criteria for Internet Gaming
Disorder: Debunking Differences Between Addiction and
High Engagement in a German Sample of World of Warcraft
Players” was published in Computers in Human Behavior, vol.
45, April 2015.
The article “The Social Side of Gaming: How Playing

Online Computer Games Creates Online and Offline
Social Support” was written by the University of Hamburg’s
Institute of Social Psychology’s Sabine Trepte, Leonard
Reinecke, Keno Juechems, and was published in Computers
in Human Behavior, vol. 28, issue 3, May 2012.
The Design of a Hardcore Raider
Roger Caillois’s book Man, Play, and Games was first published
in English by Free Press of Glencoe in 1961, translated by
Meyer Barash from the original French Les jeux et les hommes:
Le masque et le virtige (1958).
The book Building Successful Online Communities was first

published in 2011 by MIT Press, with Robert E. Kraut and
Paul Resnick as its chief authors. The chapter “Encouraging
Commitment in Online Communities” was written by
Yuqing Ren, Robert E. Kraut, Sara Kiesler and Paul Resnick.
Alex Golub’s article “Being in the World (of Warcraft):

Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively
Multiplayer Online Game” was published in Anthropological
Quarterly, vol. 83, issue 1, Winter 2010.
Exodus’s guild leader Killars’s public Facebook post dated

April 26, 2013 may be found here: http://bit.ly/1V6UQQw
WoW player SynCaine’s September 13, 2007 post “Looking

in the mirror; the sickness that was WoW Raiding” may be
found on his blog Hardcore Casual: http://bit.ly/1ThfY1J
105
Margot
Attendance figures and other data on BlizzCon were sourced

from WoWWiki (http://bit.ly/1TWwC9f ) and Wikipedia
(http://bit.ly/1WB2Z1i), both of which do a fine job of
collating this scattered information.
That study of more than 19,000 married individuals was

“Marital Satisfaction and Break-ups Differ Across On-line
and Off-line Meeting Venues” written by John T. Cacioppoa,
Stephanie Cacioppoa, Gian C. Gonzagab, Elizabeth L.
Ogburnc, and Tyler J. VanderWeelec. It was published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), vol.
110, no. 25, June 18, 2013.
The Entertainment Software Association has published the

annual report Essential Facts About the Computer and Video
Game Industry since 2004. The reports from 2004-2009 are
currently hosted at the Princeton University Library. The
reports from 2010 through 2014 can be found here: http://
bit.ly/1R5bXv6. The 2015 report (in PDF) can be found at
http://bit.ly/1CLEhg4, and the 2016 report (also in PDF)
can be found here: http://bit.ly/1XYOilD.
Newzoo’s 2014 percentage of female WoW players was

sourced from Drew Harwell’s October 17, 2014 Washington
Post article “More women play video games than boys, and
other surprising facts lost in the mess of Gamergate,” which
can be found at http://wapo.st/1Ok7lS2. Newzoo’s 2015
percentage of female players, as well as WoW’s total player
number 7.1 million, comes from Saira Mueller’s July 8, 2015
International Business Times article “Female WoW Players
Tell All: What Is World Of Warcraft Really Like For Them?”,
which can be found here: http://bit.ly/1NTnwX2.
Stephanie Rosenbloom’s New York Times article “It’s Love

at First Kill” was published on April 22, 2011, and may be
found here: http://nyti.ms/1TWIlEB
On That Happy Note, Let’s Talk About Divorce
Lokien’s January 31, 2012 discussion thread “World of

Warcraft and Divorce” (including comments by Earthweaver)
may be found on Battle.net’s forums: http://blizz.ly/23VEsTl
Information on the 2011 study conducted by Divorce Online

was reported in both popular and gaming news sources.
Information here was taken from Lydia Warren’s article
“Video games being blamed for divorce as men ‘prefer World
of Warcraft to their wives’,” updated on May 31, 2011. It may
be found here on DailyMail.com: http://dailym.ai/1stD13f.
Brigham Young University researchers Michelle Ahlstrom

and Neil Lundberg’s study of 349 couples is titled “Me, My
Spouse, and My Avatar: The Relationship Between Marital
Satisfaction and Playing Massively Multiplayer Online Role-
Playing Games (MMORPGs)” and was published in Journal
of Leisure Research, vol. 44, no. 1, 2012.
107
Tribes of Warcraft
Thomas Brignall’s quotes here and elsewhere are from the

chapter “Guild Life in the World of Warcraft: Online Gaming
Tribalism,” published in the book Electronic Tribes edited
by Tyrone L. Adams and Stephen A. Smith, published by
University of Texas Press in June 2009.
Block and Get Over It
The exchange between the World of Warcraft player and the

Blizzard Customer Support forum moderator occured in a
2013 thread titled “Guild is Sexually Harassing / Racist.” It
can be found on Battle.net’s forums: http://blizz.ly/1NwiBQy
The Judgment of the Tribunal
Background on Riot Games’ attempt to fix League of Legend’s

online culture can be found in Michael McWhertor’s October
13, 2012 article “The League of Legends team of scientists
trying to cure ‘toxic behavior’ online: Riot Games turns to
psychology to combat negativity” published at Polygon:
http://bit.ly/1zR9GeY
The Tribunal ruling on LoL player Christian “IWillDominate”

Rivera can be found on the game’s official foums here: http://
riot.com/1TWInMJ
Variable Ratio Enforcement
Jonathan Blow delivered his lecture “Design Reboot” at the

Montreal International Games Summit on November 27,
2007. Quotes from this section were taken from Brandon Boyer
and Leigh Alexander’s report on the lecture, “MIGS 2007:
Jonathan Blow On The ‘WoW Drug’, Meaningful Games,”
published the following day on November 28 at Gamasutra:
http://ubm.io/1Xw1ccP. On November 29, Blow relea-
sed the audio and slides for the lecture on the official Braid
blog: http://bit.ly/1TUewBK
HolyHealz’s quote comes from from Alex Golub’s “Being in

the World (of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge
Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game,” cited
above.
Silver Lining
John Romero and Peter Molyneux appeared in season 1,

episode 1 of The Electric Playground, first aired on September
23, 1997 and available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/
IrmBHPL5Kfc. John Carmack appeared in season 1, episode
12, first aired on December 7, 1997 and available at https://
youtu.be/TfeSMaztDVc.
109
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you, Michael P. Williams, for the massive

research assistance for this book.
Thank you, Gabe Durham, for being a stellar editor
and publisher.
Thank you, Brian Hewes, for letting me read bits of
this book at you for the last year.
Thank you, Devony Schmidt, the smartest person
on the planet, for taking time to speak with me about
our time shared in World of Warcraft.
Thank you, Austin and Andy, wherever y’all are in
the world today.
Thank you, old guildies, for your community.
Thanks, Mom.
SPECIAL THANKS
For making our second season of books possible, Boss

Fight Books would like to thank Ken Durham, Jakub
Koziol, Cathy Durham, Maxwell Neely-Cohen, Adrian
Purser, Kevin John Harty, Gustav Wedholm, Theodore
Fox, Anders Ekermo, Jim Fasoline, Mohammed Taher,
Joe Murray, Ethan Storeng, Bill Barksdale, Max Symmes,
Philip J. Reed, Robert Bowling, Jason Morales, Keith
Charles, and Asher Henderson.
ALSO FROM BOSS
FIGHT BOOKS
1. EarthBound by Ken Baumann

2. Chrono Trigger by Michael P. Williams
3. ZZT by Anna Anthropy
4. Galaga by Michael Kimball
5. Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi
6. Super Mario Bros. 2 by Jon Irwin
7. Bible Adventures by Gabe Durham

8. Baldur’s Gate II by Matt Bell
9. Metal Gear Solid by Ashly & Anthony Burch
10. Shadow of the Colossus by Nick Suttner
11. Spelunky by Derek Yu
12. World of Warcraft by Daniel Lisi
★ Continue? The Boss Fight Books Anthology

Worldofwarcraft Bossfight

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World of Warcraft

Copyright © 2016 Daniel Lisi

ISBN 13: 978-1-940535-12-8

Series Editor: Gabe Durham

1 What I Talk About When I Talk About Warcraft

In an aggressively hormonal and socially isolated

1. Pay Blizzard. After purchasing the game client

I became a hardcore player. After Joe got me hooked,

The Genesis of Warcraft

On February 8, 1991, UCLA graduates Michael

Since WoW’s player base peak in 2010, the MMO’s

The Mechanics of World of Warcraft

After creating an account with Blizzard Entertainment’s

• Poor Quality: Denoted with grey text. Good only

These mechanics as I’ve explained them create

I was participating in a raid on the shadowy tower of

In his 1961 book Man, Play, and Games, sociologist

These instances generally follow a certain “pro-

Exodus, one of World of Warcraft’s highest-ranked

I always felt I could be doing more, that our guild

Whenever I did miss a raid, I would hear about it

The game became a stressful obligation rife with

The Second Best

Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft’s second

When I was fifteen years old—two years into playing

On That Happy Note, Let’s Talk About Divorce

Now that we’ve covered the dating pool that is Azeroth,

I wanna hear some tips to help a married couple

To keep my wife off my meat grinder what I say is

Or more simplistic I say “Hey babe you haven’t

And if those don’t work I just wait until she passes

I hope that Lokien was successful in keeping his wife

I introduced my wife to the game. Set her up

She is now just as addicted as I am.

Blizzard should sell Spouse cages on their website.

Yes, totally. Thank you, Lokien.

When playing as one of my alternate characters,

Virtual worlds are not free from real-world

Enter the griefer, such a frequent occurrence in our

Block and Get Over It

What improved my online etiquette even further was

Player: A guild I am in is sexually harassing

Thank you for your time, and I am sorry this

Edit: I should mention I won’t be leaving this

Moderator: This is an issue.

If your intention of staying in this guild is to

Of course that kind of behavior is not welcome,

I’d normally recommend that you have a chat with

While it makes sense that World of Warcraft GMs

Prejudicial conversations were commonplace in

The question remains whether it is Blizzard’s

The Judgment of the Tribunal

Perhaps it isn’t the online social platform’s obligation to

His persistent tendency to engage in verbal

On December 24, 2012, all of Rivera’s accounts

The pinnacle of my WoW career was from the

The Fellowship Gathers

Before heading to Arizona, we had to stop in Palm Springs

The Quest Imperiled

“Did you know that your computer is gone?” was

Creation requires intention. Be it in fine art, a piece

Run right → smoosh bad guys underfoot →

Whereas a loop from a Final Fantasy game might